Friday, 06 December 2002
More fun with CSS: I've added three more style sheets to the pull-down menu in the sidebar, and cleaned up the others to make them more cross-browser compatible. (I'm testing on Chimera 0.6/Mac and MSIE 6/Win, mostly because those are the browsers I use at home and work, respectively.) The new stylesheets may look vaguely familiar, but they're 100% CSS; the Blogger templates they resemble are HTML based. Choose your favorite and enjoy.
(MSIE still has a few bugs that make these pages less attractive than they should be: The USA/Oz graphic in the corner has a transparent background, but you wouldn't know it from the way MSIE displays PNG files. It looks especially bad with a dark background, as some of the style sheets demonstrate. MSIE also crashes a lot when it encounters the CSS2 first-letter tag, but only under certain bizarre circumstances that are difficult to isolate.)
I'm also having a problem with Blogger inserting non-conforming HTML markup into my updates, though; if I can't find a way around it, I may have to remove my "HTML 4.0" badge. (Blogger inserts unmatched <p> tags into my text whenever I start a new paragraph, and it has a nasty habit of mangling the HTML em dash ("—") when I edit an article.) No one said complying with standards was easy, I guess.
Actually the problem is more pervasive than I realized: Blogger's editing function converts any HTML escape sequence into the character it represents. If I type "<p>", publish, and then edit, Blogger silently converts that string to "<p>", and then the re-published article contains HTML markup instead of the characters I wanted to display. I should talk to the Blogger folks about that, or (more likely) roll my own editor and use it instead.
- Posted by Scott Forbes at 12:02 am. comments.
