Categories
Graphics/CSS

Fluid Elastic Static

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I am a good bread and butter CSS designer, and can create designs that look relatively decent in browsers and validate, but I’ve never taken my design to the higher levels. When I re-make my sites over into the new layout, I want to change the design to allow for greater accessibility.

One aspect I’m exploring is the concepts of elastic design versus fluid and static. Right now I use static settings for my column and sidebar width, which means if you open the page in a smaller browser, you’re going to get a horizontal scrollbar:

width: 650px

The fluid approach is to use percentages rather than fixed values, which means the contents resize based on the browser window. However, I hate lines of text that are too long. If the browser is opened in a high resolution monitor, the writing will become very difficult to read.

width: 85%;

Enter the concept of elastic layout, as originated in A List Apart and other posts such as this at 456 Berea Street. With this approach, a maximum width is given so that regardless of browser and screen, the container doesn’t expland past a certain point. However, if the page is shrunk, the column shrinks accordingly.

max-width: 650px;

or

max-width: 40em;

Unfortunately max-width isn’t supported in IE 6, which means until IE 6 is a thing of the past, I’ll have to use a IE 6 workaround. The workaround requires I use invalid CSS, though, and regardless of how that’s packaged, it’s not something I’ve not wanted to do. However, pushing horizontal scrolls on folks also isn’t what I’ve wanted to do.

I still need to work through images in the posts, but I must say that web page design and development today is a lot more intersting than it was when we were struggling with the 4.x browsers.

A member of the webdesign-l list group send around links with good liquid and elastic CSS articles. The links to these are part of a resource site maintained by the University of Minnesota. There’s an extensive section on accessibility, JavaScript, XML, PHP, and even a section on Sites & Blogs related to web design. It’s probably the best and most comprehensive Web Design Reference site I’ve seen.

Categories
Insects

Wine for Joe

This one is for Joseph Duemer: having problems with tent catepillars? Make something useful from them: make wine.

From a review of the wine (which also includes more details in how to make it):

Some lucky folks will get a bonus. Reigstad saved and froze 30 large army worms to put in bottles, similar to the worms put in some tequila bottles.

Who will get those bottles?

“Very special people,” Reigstad said. “Not necessarily people I like, but they’ll be special in their own way.

Categories
Diversity Technology

Focusing

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Interesting. The Ajax Experience no longer has the dubious distinction of have no women in its speaker list. It now has Molly Holzschlag.

Since I know absolutely squat about JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest other than what they do, it’s rather humorous I’d get picked up for such a seriously geeky conference as The Ajax Experience.

Categories
Weblogging

Me feed fifteen

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

(I wanted to spell it Phiphteen to be über hip, but my cat hissed at me.)

Now this is fun. PZ Myers writes on the Hot or Not Scienceblogger where he ended up at number three. (He wonders why. It’s the squid, PZ. They’re sexy.)

Guess what boys and girls. The hottest science blogger is Shelley Batts a third year Neuroscience PhD candidate.

Janet Stemwedel (that’s Dr. Stemwedel to you) cried, “Have at ye!” with a nerd-off:

It’s time for a nerd-off.

My opening volley after the jump, starting where one does: my momma.

The nerd apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. My momma programs in COBOL.

Circa 1989, my momma emailed me ASCII cow-art. Some of it was NSFW.

Oh yeah? Well, where do you think your momma got that art?

(Yes, I realize that I’m not a science blogger…but I got geek street cred.)

Categories
Stuff

Door number three

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Today is a sci-fi kind of day, as I place my order at Amazon for the newly-released-on-DVD, This Island Earth and Godzilla – Gojira Deluxe Collector’s Edition. Gojira is a return to the original Godzilla movie, sans Americanization, and I’m really looking forward to seeing this version.

Last week I picked up this 12 DVD set of movies packaged as “Scifi classics” consisting of public domain movies burned on to DVDs in all their scratchy, bad audio glory. The set cost a little over 12.00, which amounts to about 1.00 a DVD. As for being classics, I’ve never heard of any of the movies. They’re the worst cheese, awful, and I love every bit. I plan on trying to review at least a couple a week, and then point to where you can download the movies for free.

I just noticed that Sci-Fi’s Eureka is now an iTunes download, making it the last of the set I watch and that can now be downloaded from the Internet or bought as DVD. Once the new Fall lineup at sci-fi goes into effect, and after the premier of Battlestar Galactic, we’re disconnecting the cable and going with DVDs and internet downloads (and books and hikes and what not) for entertainment.

St. Louis Today has been running a series on the problems they’ve had getting their Charter internet connection to work. Considering this is a newspaper’s online site, having a decent internet connection is a requirement. However, they’ve gotten the run around, been given misleading information, and have had repair people not show up at scheduled times and the paper is now looking at moving it’s broadband access to another company.

This started a blitz of emails and letters from other Charter customers complaining of service. Cable and cellphone service are the number one and two complaint, respectively, at Better Business Bureau; so much so the organization has set up separate systems just for these items. (The BBB also recommends turning complaints about misrepesentation of service into the state attorney general for possible prosecution.) Charter is number one for customer dissatisfaction in our area.

It used to be you didn’t have a choice if you wanted to watch television: you subscribed to cable or you picked up whatever you could get on an antenna. Then there was the dish and satellite, which provided a second option, but one which still requires that you subscribe to a service you may end up not liking (and its usually not the best option if you live in an apartment or townhome), and which requires specialized equipment and holes drilled into your walls and floor.

Now there’s a third option, door number three: downloads and DVD. More television networks are providing their material free (with or without commercials) or via a download service such as iTunes (many downloadable the next day after original air date). Show production companies now provide boxed sets for each show’s season. Combining all of these options to get the shows a person really wants is cheaper than paying $50.00 or more dollars a month for ‘basic and expanded’–service consisting more and more of home shopping networks and channels that repeat the same movie or show again and again.

We’re picking door number three. Sayonara Charter.

Update

The New York Times has an article on the webisodes that Sci-Fi is releasing for Battlestar Galactica. They’re previews of the upcoming episodes.