From the site...

IE7 invokes a DHTML behavior to load and parse all style sheets into a form that Explorer can understand. You can then use most CSS2 selectors without having to resort to CSS hacks.

wow.
sexXxy. Thanks Keith.

Shell and I have been working with CSS lots lately. You know, not relying on inapropiate tables, and such. But we lacked the terminology to talk about CSS rules effectively. Well no longe, thanks to the folk responsible for the "style" project at Tigris.org:

Daniel thought this CSS terminology pointer from the dev mailing list was too important not to put on this page:

selector { property: value }
              \_declaration_/
   \___________ rule _________/

There, now you don't need to say "CSS tags" ever again.

Now, to get the matching tattoos for our foreheads.

Andy Budd said (Malarkey Quoted, and John Hicks pointed...)

You’ll wrap a div or a span around another element (or group of element) to act as a hook for your style. By doing this you’re adding meaningless markup to your code for display reasons. This makes you feel bad, so you’ll try to give these hooks some meaning. You’ll put all your branding code inside a div called branding and your main content will go inside a div imaginatively called mainContent. The question that springs to my mind is "does it matter?"

Actually, I don't feel bad at all. It doesn't matter because the markup you are adding does have meaning.

A div is a dividing block. If I do something like <div id="nav" class="SideBarBox"> ... blah blah blah ...</div> the semantics are there. The content inside of the div, is somehow different from the content in the rest of the page. Yes, you don't get the same level of semantics as using a h1 for a headline, but it is there. The idea that presentational markup is semantically null is... well.. null. A header has Semantic meaning, as well as presentational one.

Going beyond all that, Malarkey has proposed an interesting idea, and that is to name divs in a consistent manner. This is just one step below adding a <footer> or a <nav> element to XHTML. In fact, there really would be nothing stopping you from building your own (meta?)structural markup language, and using (and styling) that along with XHTML.

But exploring that is for another entry...

It is by no means perfect. The margins are a little screwy, the first date div is smashed up against the left side due to some kind of box-model freakout I am sure, but for the moment, the CSS is at least workable in IE.

God, what a piece of shit.

So I fixed my Float/Clear problem by positioning the right side absolutely, and giving the content area a margin equal to the right side. This is a variation on the canonical(sp?) Glish 3 Column Holy Grail. The lesson? Don't do anything complex with css and IE. Stick to tables man. Until microsoft fixes their borken-browser, it is either pain and hacks, or tables.

Update: It just has to do with the single "info" div on the Original IE Fixins post. As soon as I get some time... (that is, next week. 8P) I will fight with IE some more, and fix0r it up. Interesting to note however, that there is Another Post that has a right floating info div, that does not interfere the same way..

While Harmony had her nap, I spent some time working with the css of the site, in attempt to fix some of the brokenness. Not surprisingly enough, Internet Exploder is the biggest culprit. There are posts abound about how much IE interferes with shit. There are plenty of Well deserved tirades all about how Internet Explorer's CSS mangling is teh suck.

I fixed the list at the right hand side. It still needs some tweaking, but it is coming along. At least it doesn't horribly break in IE anymore. Next up on the list, is the little problem of the nested div, that clears inappropriately.

Looks like I am not the only one trying to Take an Objective Look at table and css layouts.

I do have some problems with the article, this paragraph being the biggest one:

Despite the fact that pioneers have been talking about web standards for a long time, the majority of web sites are still developed using tables and non standards compliant code. Because of this, user agents will be forced to handle table based layouts for many years to come. This effectively negates one of the biggest selling points for web standards. That of forward compatibility. It’s highly unlikely that in the near future, any of the big browser manufacturers (um, that'll be Microsoft then) will release a browser that renders the majority of sites unusable.

So, because user agents will be forced to handle table based layouts, it negates forward compatibility?

... Click on the read more link to ... err.. read more.

John Hicks has a good diagram for all you CSS beginners out there. This shows you the "stacking order" of the various CSS properties of boxes (padding, border, margin, background color and background images)

Very nice indeed. Informative, and pretty! Though, I think that the background-image image (ugh, a mouthful) could be different, perhaps a different color, and/or an understated pattern of some sort. Perhaps an isometric view would tell the story of how everything fits together nicely? I dunno. It is much easier to play armchair design critic then it is to actually design.

Interestingly enough, no spelling mistakes on this entry. Now I just need to get "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" and fix my punkchewashun.