pointless talking

[Kami]

I was reviewing pictures of our high school band in New York City from this May.

Ah, the memories.. unforgettable.

[Vagrant]

$400 gas and electric bill this month. Oh my.

Sounds close to what the one hear may be, ouch.

Yeah, it just keeps going up. Stupid me expected it to be the same as last month.

I can relate, believe me. I tend to love my gaming, it's the only thing that keeps me centered, sometimes. But it can cost an arm and a leg in electricity.

I'm almost tempted to move to Belgium, where they have fixed rate electrical charges...

[Midnight]

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[Vagrant]

That usually happens when the CSS is separated off into another file, and the server isn't reliable. Unless the developer is 100 per cent sure that the server is reliable, then the CSS should be embedded in the HTML itself. The problem isn't so much with the CSS itself, it's just developers who aren't familiar with how it should be used, so having the CSS in a separate file where the server may fart and not call that outside file is bad web design.

I suppose it could be solved though by simply removing the exteranlising aspect from the implementation, so that CSS has to be embedded in the HTML file, that'd probably cause some difficulties though for those who generate pages dynamically.

But yes, I agree with you Midnight, it's really annoying when the CSS is separated off like that and it doesn't load, I'm left with something that looks like mobile-phone WAP browsing.

[Spongy]

I usually make a link to the CSS sheet in the first few lines (of code) on a page. So far it's never failed for me on my local server or remote server.

In other news, I'll be eating leftovers for a week. Waaay too much food was made at the Julbord yesterday.

[Vagrant]

It usually really depends on how much the server in question is being hammered, when the server is reaching the upper ends of its capacity; either in bandwidth or system resources, this kind of thing can occur.

It's especially prevalent on big, popular sites that do get hammered a lot (I've seen it happen more often than I care to remember on Wikipedia, Slashdot and SourceForge), and all that'll end up showing is a screen of text interspersed with images. I've even seen it on sites that are fully XML/HTML compliant, so it's not down to bad code either, it's just that sometimes the server sends the HTML but fails to send the CSS sheet.

Think of it like this: Have you ever seen a page where an image has failed to load and all you've got is one of those little failed download icons in the space where the image should be? That can happen with a CSS sheet too. It's really caused by bad server software, or hardware that's just not up to the task, it's rarely ever caused by code. So I never blame the developers.

I just think it was a bad idea originally, within the original documentation, considering this failure can occur.

[Spongy]

Odd. I've never seen it happen. Ah well, maybe I'm just lucky.

[lycanthropeful]

I was reviewing pictures of our high school band in New York City from this May.

Ah, the memories.. unforgettable.

Well if it was May, then I can assume you weren't there for the Macy's Day Parade (I marched in it in 2006! So much fun!). New York City is always a great place for a band trip, though. There is so much to do.

What were you guys there for? (*is a huge band geek*)

[*nagowteena*]

these dragon egg things are addicting...

[Vagrant]

I agree with you, nagow. As I rambled of elsewhere, they're like a psyche-virus and they just keep spreading, soon they'll be everywhere ... and then it'll be too late!

And... I did have a bit more about CSS here, but it's about the CSS standards really, and how could make designers look better, but I'll move it to the venting thread.

[Spongy]

Sorry spongypants, I didn't mean to vent.

No worries. No offense taken or anything. You actually pointed something out I never thought would happen.

Whereas if CSS fails, it makes the designer look bad instead of pointing out an error, I dislike that. If CSS were handled properly, it could point out that sheet is missing due to server or connection error, rather than just displaying a sprawl of text and imagery.

That's a really good idea. Sounds like something that you may already be able to do with PHP, but I'm no expert.

[Vagrant]

Yep, I really wasn't meaning to take a dig or anything, that wasn't my intention at all, so I'm glad you didn't take any offence. I'm just not good at really conveying what I'm thinking a lot of the time, and I rarely do that succinctly, that's why I moved it all over to the venting thread, so I could do it with space and so that I wasn't just ranting here.

But my problem really is that the inherent flaws in the CSS system can bring a design down. I've seen some absolutely beautiful designs, as I said in the venting thread, the CSS garden and everything, but due to the rickety client-side handling of CSS, that can all fall apart if the sheet isn't called... and I don't think that's really fair to the designer, because they did their job perfectly. It's just a flaw in the way the system is designed.

If web browsers would retry on a CSS sheet a few times, and then show a well-formatted error explaining what had happened if it still couldn't obtain it, then that would clean up the problem perfectly. But as it is, they don't, there's no documented need for that, but I always thought there should be.

The whole point of these standards, after all, is to allow everyone to see a site how the designer intended.

[Spongy]

The whole point of these standards, after all, is to allow everyone to see a site how the designer intended.

If only Microsoft shared that view. Internet Explorer continually breaks the websites I make.

..Which is why I always stick a Firefox note on the websites as well.

[Midnight]

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[Vagrant]

I can relate something similar too, Midnight.

A while back, I was working on CSS for a friend's site, his web-comic in fact. I managed to do something really neat, and it looked fantastic. It displayed perfectly in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and even Internet Explorer, but I couldn't get it to validate without changing something that broke the appearance, and I couldn't find any way within the official standards to replicate what I'd done (it was a bit of cheap hackery, I admit).

I had to explain this solemnly to my friend, that we'd either keep the new design and lose the standards-compliant buttons, or we'd have to keep the old design and keep the buttons. So we dropped the buttons and went with the new design after all.

It was at that point I was almost tempted to start up something, but I'm no good at starting things up because I stink at advertising, so I didn't bother. But I was tempted to create a site that stressed the purpose of using the standards as guidelines, not the be-all-and-end-all of web design, and that having a website that worked perfectly on all browsers was more important than having a compliant site. I'd supply a button and all someone would have to do in order to sport it would be to check their site in the four main browsers, and if it worked in them they could use it.

Anyway, to finish up here ... if you want someone else to pester so that you don't feel as though you're pestering takyoji all the time, you can PM me any questions you might have, too, and I'll do my best to help out. You could add me on an IM network if you'd like. I just thought I'd offer, anyway.

[Midnight]

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[MoonKit]

Im starting to feel like an Aunt to all the dragon eggs lying around here. Watching them grow up so quickly! There will be a time in the future where we'll look back and say "oh, hey, you remember way back when...when we all raised dragons?" And we'll all smile and laugh.

[Vagrant]

The Pack: Bringing Werewolves together to raise and ranch Dragon younglings since 1876!

[MoonKit]

The Pack: Bringing Werewolves together to raise and ranch Dragon younglings since 1876!

Bunch of werewolves trying to raise baby dragons, now that is a funny thought! Someone draw a picture! Quick! Baphnedia and his army of werewolf slaves to raise his hundreds of children.

[*nagowteena*]

The Pack: Bringing Werewolves together to raise and ranch Dragon younglings since 1876!

[Vagrant]

Gah, fool of a not-Took that I am, I was having so much fun with the Dragon thing that I hadn't noticed you'd replied to me, Midnight. Sorry!

As far as CSS for centring is concerned, it's a real headache, I know. The problem with it is that there are two types of rules depending on what you want to centre.

For example, if you're centring text...

Code: Select all

<span style="text-align: center;">

That will work for text. But if you're centring images, that's another matter entirely. Images are a pain to centre, and the only successful way I've found of doing it is something like this...

Code: Select all

<img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="./image.jpg" alt="This is an image.">

And look at all that fuss when <center> does exactly the same thing in all browsers regardless.

[Midnight]

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[Vagrant]

The block method I described above can work for combinations of text and images, I've used it that way once or twice. What may work is if you were to try something like...

Code: Select all

<td style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;">

I have no idea whether that'll actually work though without testing it. But it really does seem better to just use <center>, I like that tag too, it simply works! So if you don't feel you have to use CSS, then I really think you should stick with what works, to heck with standards! As long as it looks good in the majority of browsers, that's all that matters.

As for your connection, I can imagine what that must be like. Broadband took so long to roll out in Britain that it actually became a joke, over time. My area still doesn't have cable, only DSL, and getting them to roll out DSL in my area required over 200 people to sign a petition to show their interest. I actually took part in an effort to raise awareness for that, simply just to get them to stop being so lazy about it and actually do it.

It's horrible being stuck with a bad connection, I hope the oppurtunity comes up for something better eventually.

[*nagowteena*]

It snowed a little! patches of snow are everywhere.

that's all I'll probably get for the rest of this winter.

[Xiroteus]

Snowed a lot here, been lot once in the last twelve days because we got a ride.

Snow can go away now.