Category: Software and Programming

Dave: “As long as I’ve been doing outliners, people have been trying to do boxes-and-arrows visualizations of the same structures, with tantalizing and colorful demos, that aren’t too useful. I did a project myself in the mid-80s. The user interface was unwieldy.“

I wanted to blog these blogs by Mozilla coders a while ago:

David Hyatt‘s is probably the most interesting for people who are interested in developer gripes, while Matthew Thomas‘s blog is interesting if you care about things like The top ten usability problems in Mozilla.

Once you’ve read a bunch of the Mozillian blogs, you might find this one funny.

Sjoerd Visscher has a link to a neat hack which gives you basic WYSIWYG editing in Mozilla, by using Javascript to mimic Internet Explorer’s ContentEditable property.

This was developed by a company called Q42, who are developing something called Xopus.

So instead of updating my Blog, I’m fiddling with its Style Sheet.

Unlike Radio, which uses templates heavily based on work-anywhere, look-the-same-in-any-browser tables, Movable Type relies on CSS for the design of it’s default templates, which are all in XHTML-whatever.

CSS looks different in each browser, but it’s main advantage is that it makes the HTML much cleaner to write. No more <tr> <td> </td> </tr> <tr>… crap to wade through everytime.

Now, the style sheet could do with some simplifying (notice all the different fonts – they could do with some reduction), but the CSS lets you do cool stuff.

It has it’s limitations, though. For example, it took me a while to figure out how to recreate the simple design I used in my regular pages – a full-width header, two columns (content and sidebar), and a full-width footer. The tricky part was the footer, and the solution to that problem was a CSS attribute called clear, which effects how a given box of text (DIV or P) is arranged in relation to floating elements (the way I do the sidebar is to use the float attribute to float the content to the left of the sidebar, or vice-versa).

What clear does is to move the box (P or DIV) to which it applies down until it’s below the floating box(P or DIV).

God, that was horribly technical.

Anyway, I stole the float bit from Mark Pilgrim‘s style-sheets, and although I looked at the useful tips and templates at Glish.com, I found the attribute I needed on the style sheet for the front page of BlueRobot.

I noticed diveintomark using the abbr tag, and I can’t see him setting any style rule for it in his default style sheets. Wonder what it does?

Not much in Internet Explorer (5), but plenty in Mozilla.