The Office With Minions 27 Jan, 2005
I'm one of them too. Available in:
Two Safari Bugs 23 Jan, 2005
Over the Christmas break, I discovered a couple of important bugs in Safari's rendering engine. I endeavored to install Konqueror on Windows to test whether it's a global issue in KHTML or something simply in Safari's modifications, but it was too complex for my available time.
Heck, it's taken me over three weeks to get to writing down a proper description of them! Without further adieu:
Safari Bug #1: tbody with display: none
This one is kind of serious, but has some easy workarounds that don't really mess with the semantics of the document that much. I can also see why it wasn't discovered before, as it requires a change in the page after it's loaded, in order to be triggered.
Basically, if you have a tbody that is assigned display: none
(either through a class, or direct modification of el.style),
it works fine. When you try to show it again, and it doesn't have any
visible tbodys before it in the table, the table boundaries
don't recalculate properly. I'm sure that made zero sense, so here are
some screenshots, and a test page.
Basically, the workaround is to avoid the conditions in the first place
(i.e. making this the first visible tbody), by having an
empty tbody before it. I checked the spec, and a
tbody does not have to contain any child elements,
and the Validator also doesn't kvetch any. Another option is to toggle
the visibility of another tbody later in the sequence,
which will force a recalculation. I, personally, can't decide which way
I like better, because they're both pretty nonsemantic. That's why I
came up with workaround #2. Instead of hiding the tbody,
just hide tbody tr through a class. This seems to be the
best way, because it requires no extra changes to the html, and leaves
the script (for the most part) untouched.
Safari Bug #2: floats in lists are bad for your health.
Safari does something special to show list numbers, it seems. If the
first visible element inside a li is floated (left), it
goes wonky. There's no easy way around this, because if you were to
enclose it in a div, that wouldn't solve anything because
it is just a container (which of course is exactly what we wanted it
to be). Curses!
My best way around this is to simply put a title on the first line of
the li, and do my fancy floats after. This doesn't affect
things like the listmatic code, because they have numbers turned off.
I initially discovered this while trying to embed a dl
with a floated-left dt inside a ol →
li.
Seconds to Fall 23 Jan, 2005
Well, it took years to climb this hill
— Seconds to Fall by Fury in the Slaughterhouse
and now we look up to the mountain
while it is higher still
there’s something we can not forget
It takes seconds to fall.
So, it's now the much-awaited year 2005. This is going to come out like some sort of internal monologue, you know the really annoying "this is what I am thinking" ones on Seinfeld, so forgive me. I realize that.
Classes started again last week, and after experiencing four days worth, they seem bearable. I've got CSCI 3600 with Staff (lucked out, and it's actually Mehran); SOCI 1510 (honors); MATH 2700 (with some old guy); GERM 3050 with Magilow (not liking this class yet); and PHYS 1710.
Of all those, PHYS 1710 has got to be the most useless course. It doesn't have calculus as a prerequisite, so they're re-teaching all sorts of math concepts like "average" and "significant digits" which is mind-numingly boring. One guy has his Nintendo DS open the whole time, I played Cowy the Minesweeper (killer app for the Mac, by the way), and I wish I had my Visor (back when Handspring was its own company) to play Galaxian.
Things at the office are certainly shaping up to be an interesting year — among Mujtaba, Kate, and myself we've got a lot to accomplish. The new prototype site will go live in the near future, so we're in crunch mode to get it all set up properly so it can be ported to the live server, all while putting out little fires with existing pages.
My personal projects are piling up without any chance of finishing them all — just check the wiki and see how many of those are not released yet. I really need to get SVN or CVS up so track changes, as my SCM is currently ftp'ing a zip file to myself. Sure, it handles revisions nicely if I want a complete rollback, but provides absolutely no capability for automatic diffs.
In other news, I'm still working on my redesign. I had a new inspiration over the weekend, and am changing it all up to be more simplistic, and less blue. If peach is the new beige and beige is the new black, then I think I'm set. If that's outdated though, I'm sunk.
It's kind of funny. Just one year ago, I would have been dreading trying to write this much, but now it just kind of comes naturally. I could write a couple pages in my sleep and I think tech writing is to thank for it. To borrow the cliché, "Less is More." "Perfection is not achieved when nothing more can be added — but when nothing more can be taken away." Storing styles separate from presentation is one of the great things I took away from that course, which really encouraged me to look into using web standards seriously.
Simplifying 13 Jan, 2005
Blue is nice, but I'm trying to aim for a cleaner layout. This is a temporary stopgap while I'm working on the next iteration (which has less blue).
Words of Wisdom From Kate 13 Jan, 2005
So much of what Kate says is funny. Here are some examples:
Kate (3:37pm): Are you really excited? I’m really excited. I’m really hot, wooh.
Or this one,
Kate:I kind of fell off the face of the earth, but now I’m back.
Tim:Sherman is off the face of the earth?
Kate: Close enough.
or...
Kate:I’ll be back tomorrow, bright and early.
Tim:Ten?
Kate:Yah.
By the way, I still don’t have commenting, just to irk her. Nobody else has asked about it :)