« Phone Home | Main | Three Sheets to the Wind »

Cascading Piles of Sheets

I understand that there are at least two problems with how this page is rendering. The first is in IE 6.0.2800.1106. The post at the top of the page does not display the date or if it does, it shows only the bottom fraction. The other is in Opera 5/6 (but works okay in 7.0). The links in the post at the top of the page do not work. The other links in the page work fine. When the top post is replaced by a newer one, the links start working in the replaced day.

I do not know if the problem is in the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or if MT itself is the culprit. But in looking at the underlying HTML, I don't see anything wrong - especially the links problem. This is straight HTML and should work in all browsers. But for some reason it doesn't.

I've started searching the support forum and see there are quite a few problems related to how different browsers work with CSS. When I have the time, I may get back to working on getting Geeklog (see their site here) working. Geeklog has the advantage of being OpenSource, while MT, although "free", is not.

Aloha!

Comments (5)

Paul:

Dan-

Your page comes through fine on Mozilla 1.2.1.

Phil:

Playing devil's advocate a little:

I don't see how the two things are related, the CSS problem and the desire to be Open Source.

Surely if the problem is CSS you have three (totally legal) options:

1) Change the CSS until it works (problematical).
2) Change the HTML so it doesn't use CSS (a fair bit of work).
3) Change the software generates both (also a fair bit of work, esp. as you may repeat the CSS/HTML problem, and need to redo both of those).

Any which way, I don't see where the OpenSource bit becomes part of the solution. But then I may be reading into your post something that isn't.

Today, IE 6.0.2800.1106 displays the date correctly at the top of the page, but when I scroll down, it displays it at the bottom. Scrolling back to the top of the page shows that IE6 has moved it. My feeling is that this is IE6 as I never experienced such problems with IE5 when viewing MT generated pages.

Mike:

(snip)I've started searching the support forum and see there are quite a few problems related to how different browsers work with CSS.(/snip)

Tell me about it :~}
I've been wrestling with the problem of sizing type across browser platforms and screen resolutions, and eventually reverted to the method I used before: relative sizing i.e. normal, small, smaller etc. Anything else brought howls of pain from lots of loyal readers about how they had to resize my page every time they accessed it.

I guess if CSS had been integrated into browsers from day 1, we wouldn't have such a mess. The upshot is that we still have to ignore most of the advantages of CSS, and put up with tables etc because there are still a LOT of old browsers in use, for whatever reason. My own site stats show that 48% of visitors are using Netscape 4.x and are the biggest group.

Cheers... /Mike

sjon:

Stop! Don't touch!

I mean, stop fiddling about because now it all works, links and all, even in Opera 5.x. ^_^

I don't think it makes a difference whether you use MT or an open-source thing in this context (I suppose you don't plan on reporogramming your tools). The disadvantage of MT is not so much it proprietary but the risk that it's development/support is stopped without notice. An OS program that gets stopped can be picked up easily again by someone else.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on February 12, 2003 8:20 AM.

The previous post in this blog was Phone Home.

The next post in this blog is Three Sheets to the Wind.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Powered by
Movable Type 3.34