Fuddland

Here are a few photos of the local area; the snow is only a few inches deep but it’s chilly enough to make me regret not putting on my hat to cover my ears.

There are plenty of scraping noises to be heard as people uncover their cars and driveways. Back home I’m sure the AA would be issuing “drive only if absolutely necessary”-type warnings, but here driving in snowy conditions is all part-and-parcel, and everyone is well-equipped with de-icers and shovels.

It must be fairly dingy in those bedrooms with the fir trees blocking out most of the light, but they probably provide some shelter from the draughts [and from annoying tourists taking photos of private property].

The following is an entry which follows on from the above:

1. Mis-aligned menus are due to rounding errors [Fuddland Bugblog]. Excerpt: The bug in Firebird that Cathy mentioned is most likely due to rounding errors, so there's not a whole lot I can do about that. Some browsers round pixels up, some round them down. Fix it for one browser and...

#1

Cathy | 2004 / 01 / 05 – 13:34

You’re kidding! This was this morning? I was just thinking today about how amazingly warm the weather was for the time of year - 10 degrees today, and about the same all the rest of this week, according to the BBC…

By the way, congrats on your new design. Just one thing - I know you’re an Opera fan, but have you looked at your swishy drop-down menus in a Gecko browser? For the Home, Weblog and Archives lis (but not, strangely, the Search or Links… not sure why), their nested uls are one pixel to the right of where they should be.

Unfortunately this is due to an Opera bug of misaligning things one pixel to the left, so presumably in Safari, etc. the uls will also be misaligned.

I haven’t really looked at your CSS, and don’t know very much about the Opera bug in question (although I do remember stumbling across it unexpectedly a couple of months ago) so I’m not sure whether it’s possible to make both Opera and all other decent browsers happy simultaneously. If not I guess it comes down to your browser stats, and making the greatest number of visitors happy :-)

#2

David | 2004 / 01 / 05 – 14:30

Re #1: Yep, that snow fell over a twenty-four hour period, and the forecast says it’ll get colder during the week. We just went for a walk to get some lunch and I can honestly say my face has never been so frozen.

I know about the rendering problem in Gecko browsers but I’d never heard about this “one-pixel to the left” bug in Opera [I can’t find any info on that bug at the moment so if you have a link let me know]. In Opera’s defence [and you know I’ll defend it to the death!], at one point I had enabled the drop-down menus in IE, using a Javascript solution to get it to recognise :hover, and the menus displayed correctly, not misaligned. [Any Safari users out there who can comment on whether the menus are misaligned or not, feel free to get in touch.]

Now I’m not saying that IE isn’t entirely bug-free in its rendering of CSS [pause whilst you fall off your chair laughing at such a notion], but I haven’t ruled out my first inclination as to what’s causing the problem: a padding or margin issue with the anchor tags within the list item [<li>] tags. The rational behind this is that the problem seems to depend, in Mozilla/Firebird Win XP at least, on the user’s text-size setting — some size settings cause the problem to be more severe than others, with weird horizontal lines appearing at the bottom of the nested menus, whilst one size setting displays without problems. This suggests it’s a Gecko engine rendering bug more than anything. I just need to play around with the CSS some more. If it makes up for it, I did add some cool transparency to the menus, which only Mozilla/Firebird users get to see. :)

If anyone else spots rendering problems, there is a dedicated bugblog post to which you can add comments about the new design.

#3

Daisy | 2004 / 01 / 06 – 04:24

Lovely pictures D!

#4

Cathy | 2004 / 01 / 07 – 12:17

Aaahhhhhh…

* Cathy makes sounds of comprehension *

In fact, I’ll say it again: aaahhhhhh…

Quite possibly, what’s happened is that I found the incongruity, assumed that Firebird has the best CSS support and therefore couldn’t possibly be wrong, and blamed Opera instead. Um. I’m sorry for casting a slight upon Opera’s character, really!

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