10/07/2005

i just got a call from a user asking me how he can highlight things on a web page.

i changed around some of the formatting code. in the links - which are now li'l tables, aren't they cute? - i had just whipped up some div style formatting, but it's reused so much that i created another class. managed to shave about 4k off the entire page, too.

so yeah, despite my hatred for tables, i must conclude - mostly due to my lack of knowledge about css - that tables are a necessity for what i wanted to do. i mean, i knew what i wanted, that is, for the expandable links to have rounded edges. easy enough to implement. the first version had two div classes. the first defined the background color and the top image, which was the whole top - rounded left to rounded right - header. the second class was used to tack the bottom in place - rounded left to rounded right. it was simple, and it required a fixed length. but for some reason, ie took that defined length and warped it to its own twisted porpoises. perhaps you saw what it looked like. it wasn't pretty.

this, the new version, uses tables - embedded inside the expando-links. (i just made that up. cool, huh?) it took a while to get right, but it's smooth, relatively simple, and exactly the same in both ie and firefox. ie still messes up the length, but since now the corners are each a seperate image, it doesn't matter.

ie also screws up the header and footer images for the post area of v3nt too, but since it won't display the image past the class's defined length, it doesn't look that bad. the only way for me to fix it is to create little tables there too. i suppose i may do that, but not now. the idea is for v3nt to look the same in both ie and firefox (and consequently all gecko browsers), and that's impossible to do completely, as i have seen time and time again.

jess gave me an interesting link this morning. crosswalker is an evangelist's site (go take a look, i'll still be here when you get back); these guys walk with these huge crosses to witness to people. a unique witness approach, to be sure. i think it's pretty cool.

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