Final JT's dinner menu.

czambran · April 6th, 2005, 12:31 AM

Richard, is there any reason why the website will not display correctly on opera 7.5? The menu gets weirdly displayed on IE, but my guess is that happens because of the bad css support of IE, but I thought opera had a pretty good CSS support.

Thanks
Christian(My head is spinning with all the CSS)

Christian

richard.york · April 6th, 2005, 07:11 AM

IE gets fixed in Chapter 18. It ought to display fine in Opera, though the menus are a little buggy. I never figured out how to get around the buggy dropdowns in Opera. I know that it is possible to get around, because I've seen stable menus in that browser.

Regards,
Rich

--
[http://www.smilingsouls.net]
Mail_IMAP: A PHP/C-Client/PEAR solution for webmail
Author: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets For Web Design

richard.york · April 6th, 2005, 07:24 AM

The real JT's site, BTW, at http://www.chokoloskee-island.com contains bug fixes that I've done since I did the book. You might be interested in comparing the site there with what's in the book. I worked quite a bit to optimize the "IE7" javascripts so that they're hardly noticeable. Still pretty good considering all the advanced CSS I'm using in a browser that doesn't support most of it natively.

I've also learned more since even then, but haven't yet gotten around to updating the site. The IE7 library works exponentally faster when ambiguous selectors are avoided (for instance the * universal selector, the more specific the selector, the better).

Also those problems with the background in IE could also be solved by removing any cascading. In other words, because I specify a background image for the same element more than once and take advantage of the cascade to choose the right one to display, it makes it way buggier in IE.

Another thing that I discovered since the book was published is the KHTML browsers don't display really small em measurements, like 0.05. For that I decided to switch to pixels instead for really small measurements, which is fine because I could still use ems for everything else.

In a perfect world I'd have had time to extensively test this example in all those browsers and discover all of this before publishing. But given I had to explain everything I was doing as I was doing it, and had only six months to write 600 pages, it left me with a less than perfect example.

Regards,
Rich

--
[http://www.smilingsouls.net]
Mail_IMAP: A PHP/C-Client/PEAR solution for webmail
Author: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets For Web Design

czambran · April 6th, 2005, 05:00 PM

Richard, I didn't mean to criticize your work. I think u have done a fantastic job. I love the book.

Christian

richard.york · April 6th, 2005, 06:40 PM

I didn't think you were criticizing ;).

Which menu example are you running, BTW?

Regards,
Rich

--
[http://www.smilingsouls.net]
Mail_IMAP: A PHP/C-Client/PEAR solution for webmail
Author: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets For Web Design

czambran · April 6th, 2005, 07:20 PM

I have been following the TJ site allong the chapters, I even decided to type all the code, because after every single change I will try to find the reason for that change,at the end it looked awsome on FF, but then I wanted to see how it would look on IE(since by now I know IE has a reall y badd CSS support) and in Opera. I then took a look at chapter14 try-it-out example 14-4 and the output was exactly the same. I decided to not keep reading until I completely understand(and can anticipate the result of using)position.

Christian

richard.york · April 7th, 2005, 09:20 AM

Ok, well in Chapter 14 you can see the final result in Gecko browsers.

I'm looking at it in Opera 8 Beta, and it looks pretty darn close. The same as what I saw several months ago in Opera 7.54. The menus are still buggy but they are usable in Opera 8. No rounded corners, of course. The fixed positioning is buggy at best, and the bottom of the logo doesn't line up with the bottom of the navigation menus.

Those are things I would tweak with a server-side browser-sniffing script like PHP.

In IE the navigation is a mess. That's why I did a whole Chapter on IE, and even that wasn't really enough. It has so many bugs and so many different ways of approaching them. At the same time, however, IE at least provides many work-arounds for that lack of support. It's scripting engine combined with various proprietary features make it possible to use CSS it doesn't yet understand. So, just put IE aside for now till you get to Chapter 18.

Regards,
Rich

--
[http://www.smilingsouls.net]
Mail_IMAP: A PHP/C-Client/PEAR solution for webmail
Author: Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets For Web Design