Archive for November, 2005

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I hit a deadline at work, and then after work as a group with the Antoines, stopped at the newly opened Cici’s on Madison just north of us. We haven’t had Cici’s in so long, and even though they have had a bit of a price jump that doesn’t make it as good of a deal as it used to be, this location was much less dirty and the food was better. (Pizza). When we got home, I read some comics and then read a good chunk into a book I just got from another teacher called “The World is Flat”. Very interesting book on how the global economy playing field is being flattened, how, why, and what that means for everyone else.

Sarah went to scrap booking and was out until close to 12, or at least I think cause I don’t remember much else after 11. She had a really hard day, and said she always has a blast doing that, so I think that cheered her up.

Starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, and briefly Kate Blanchette, this is another doozie Sarah rented from the library. I must admit, I am starting to get this sick curiosity about the strange movies she digs up, and with such a cast so recently that I had never heard of.

I was into this movie at parts. It starts off pretty bad, Kevin Spacey gets it on with this woman (Blanchett) who obviously knows how to work a man to meet her needs. They have a child, and then she runs off and drowns when her boyfriend drives them off a bridge into the water.

Spacey is kind of a loser, a cross here between is role in Usual Suspects and American Beauty, less confidence, more limp. Spacey then has an unexpected visitor right at that time, an aunt he never knew who is coming to grieve his dad, her brother. Or so it seems.

They move to escape their past, and all sorts of weird things happen in the little podunk town they end up in. A family history of piracy, incest, and a house that is held down by steel rope. Right in the middle it starts to get good, Spacey seems more like someone who has finally found his way, he is interested in Moore, and he gets a job that gives him confidence. But then the movie takes an artistic turn, and ends with a blown over house, and some cheesey parrallel between a local newspaper and their lives.

Pass on this one. It isn’t even worth it if you really like Spacey. It is especially hard to watch the old aunt, (from the James Bond movies) as this bitter old confused woman.

I felt pretty damn tired after working last night, so I got to bed early. As a result, I was able to wake up early, rested, and head into work at 7 am.

I got home at a nice time right around 4:30, downloaded some music, then took a good hard run. We had breakfast for dinner and then all the easy stuff was out of the way. I had a small deadline I had to hit for this morning, so I worked until about 12:30 on that. I did get to take a break to talk with one of my old professors, my illustration professor Bill Burgard. Nice guy, very down to earth, always helpful, I like him. I think I have changed maybe a little since I had class with him too based on what he said, so I think that is a good thing.

Sarah has started to have another sore throat. She took it easy last night, had some schoolwork to do, but watched some tv downstairs and in bed, and got to bed at a decent hour.

I am sure that this comes as a real shocker to most of you, but CSS isn’t supported consistently across browsers. Wow. Ok. Now that we got that out and on the table.

When I say browsers, usually the clients I deal with don’t have a strong need to do in depth testing for multiple browsers versions as well as many different browsers. I am able to get a good portion of the primary visiting audience by testing for Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla Firefox (any version).

Lately I have been testing more with IE 5 and Safari, mainly because I am getting a lot better at laying out complex pages in CSS in a concise manner, with reusable and portable little sections of code, and because I just got that Mac in the last couple of months. But I do run into some things pretty consistently with IE 5, and I wanted to share one of them with you tonight.

Child Selector Hack - html>body vs. class > class

There are many “hacks” in CSS which are floating around the internet. Hack is a little more vulgar of a term then the actual code you are writing. What you are actually doing most of the time is exploiting a bug or a way the browser parses certain types and orders of code to make the browser render things the way you need.

Child Selectors are something that are written into the CSS 2.1 spec. Eric Meyer, a guru on CSS, has a write up on Child Selectors at his website for more information

If you are doing complex CSS layout, you will quickly find great use for targeting specific instances of selector when they occur in your document. The Child Selector is properly supported by Mozilla Firefox because of their painstaking attention to following the standards, but Internet Explorer does not.

What this means, is that you can write a rule specifically for Firefox, and IE will completely ignore it. There are many times where I find that IE and Firefox render pixels in margin and padding differently. Usually the margin that they are rendered differently is somewhere between 4-10 pixels. Now, if you are a true expert that lives and breathes CSS, there is probably a true explanation for this. I haven’t researched that much into it yet, so as of now I don’t know that that is.

Many times I will have something positioned using margins that are relative to each other. For example, let’s say I want a two column layout inside of my main .wrapper. Here is how I would write those styles;

.leftCol{

float:left;

margin:0 0 0 20px;

width:200px;

}

.rightCol{

float:left;

margin:0 0 0 10px;

width:400px;

}

Now, a lot of time I will need all of that real estate, and totaled up here it equals 600px. So my calculations can mess up when it is off by just a couple of pixels, the floats can shift the blocks down, all sorts of fun stuff.

So, when I have my .leftCol being rendered with a margin on the left of 20px in Firefox, but in Internet Explorer it is rendered with more like a margin of 30px on the left, that is a problem. In step child selectors

For the above rule, this is what I would write instead to fix this problem. Since it is 10px more in IE, I will subtract that from my first rule;

.leftCol{

float:left;

margin:0 0 0 10px;

width:200px;

}

Now, this targets IE. But for Firefox, I want it to be 20px, so I would write this rule specifically for that browser;

html>body .leftCol{

float:left;

margin:0 0 0 20px;

width:200px;

}

What this is saying, is that when the body directly follows the html element in a document, apply the .leftCol rule.

Now, I thought this was a weird format, html>body .class. It seemed unnecessary, when I could just write a child selector rule that would work when two classes were right by each other. In this case, let’s say that the .leftCol style is right inside the main .wrapper, which we didn’t define here, but would normally. I used to write the above rule like this;

.wrapper > .leftCol{

float:left;

margin:0 0 0 20px;

width:200px;

}

But as I found out the other day, Internet Explorer 5 doesn’t seem to like this. It will actually not ignore the rule, instead read it. But it does understand that it just needs to skip over the html>body version. Now, I read online the other night that spaces make a difference. So, you have to write html>body and not html > body. So I don’t know if the spaces mattered in my above example or not, but I have started to write html>body to make sure that I cover my bases for both Internet Explorer 5 and 6.

Hope this write up was helpful. I am always looking to expand my knowledge base, just time is limited. If you have answers for any of my thoughts above, please, comment and correct me. Let me know how Margin and Padding get calculated differently, or why two .class Child Selectors together doesn’t render right in Internet Explorer 5.

Pretty normal day. The weather in the morning continues to be outstanding, so I rode in. It was so warm.

Had more church updates to do tonight, youth activities for the month.

Other than that, nothing new today, Sarah and I sat down to a nice hot meal, turkey and potatoes with gravy. She loves Thanksgiving meals.

Been doing a lot of CSS past couple of weeks, especially testing more with IE 5, so I wanted to post some stuff I was finding tonight.

Sections Updated: CSS

Steve Carell in his first starring role, and he knocks it out of the park. Don’t know if he can pull it off again, but I suspect he can. I will say, for the raunchy, stupid, guy humor in this movie, he made me believe that he was a 40 year old virgin. His antics, his personality, which was different from him and what he did on the Daily Show, it was a very funny movie.

We were so pumped to have seen two very funny movies so close together. This is very close to the same line as Wedding Crashers, but I do think a little less raunchy. The supporting cast of guys is really great, especially the guy with the beard, as well as all of the other little neurotic people he encounters, from the horny Borders girl (Elizabeth Banks) to the strange female floor manager that wants to become his “friends with benefits”. The pakistani co-workers were highly cliche however, and even though this was really funny, they did take advantage of some of the cliche’s to help make this successful. But hopefully, he will continue to try to do off the wall stuff and stray more from that.

If you see Wedding Crashers, see this. Very funny, somewhat touching and real, and an interesting commentary on women’s complexities and how a man believes he can exploit them.

I love Tuesdays.

We teach every Tuesday, which can be frustrating, but usually isn’t. Then, Tuesday nights we always go to the theater for $.50, get some donuts, and now I download new albums from Yahoo. No really big albums today, some Eurythmics, but “The 40 year old virgin” came to the theaters this week, and it was hilarious.

Chris came over after work last night and ate dinner with us. Then after the movie he stayed around to watch 2 1/2 Men from Monday night.

After he left, I had some updates to do for the church website. By the time I was done with that it was pretty late and I went to bed.

It was a beautiful beautiful night. The Colts finally won in Foxboro in New England, beating the Patriots 40-21.

Monday night football makes for a late night. But we figured, this is huge, and now that the Colts won to remain 9-0, and Peyton Manning won for the first time in New England, and probably against Tom Brady since he started playing for the Patriots, it was all worth it.

To add icing to the cake, we went over to a friend of a friend’s house. Actually a married couple, named Jeff and Sarah. They are from Michigan. She is a teacher and he likes computers. The similarities end there mostly. But it was fun to meet new people.

Sarah works with Eric at Lutheran High, and that is how that all went down. Jessica stopped by for a little bit, but had to do lesson planning. Michael Brandt came by as well, he’s a hoot.

Great night, and hopefully we can go to 9-0 this week against the sickly Houston team.