Caveat Lector

It’s eminently possible to be too clever for one’s own good.

I did a slick little trick for Info Arch client’s site involving turning a thick border into an ersatz navigation bar via relative-positioning the list of links. After much futzing, finally got it working a treat. (Except in Firebird on Win98. Still don’t know what the heck was up with that.)

The problem was that the bar was so thick it had become the dominant visual element on the page, quite overshadowing the (very slick—I can say this because I didn’t design it) logo and the nice swooshy sidebar.

This, one of my groupmates pointed out to me gently, was not good.

Well, okay, I can slim the bar a bit… maybe cut the font size… wait a minute. This is silly. Start over. Start OVER.

Five seconds later, I’d dumped the border and the relative positioning and redone the bar with thin top and bottom borders and the same unobtrusive background color as the navigation sidebar. Much, much better-looking and more reliable, though oozing much less cleverness.

Hey. Maybe the gray instead of the green for the borders there, since the page is so green-heavy… I’ll see. Either way, less cleverness meant a better-looking page.

Eventually I shall be clever again, I’m sure. Fear me…

So after class today I hopped into the SLIS computer lab to see if my whiz-bang new design for Info Arch passes muster in IE6.

What. The. EFFING. Hell. Is. That. I swore to myself as the bottom border on the header mysteriously doubled itself (obliterating my quick-links bar), and the submenus swelled to twice acceptable size.

See, this is why I normally do web design in private. I just can’t manage to do it without cussing a blue streak about CSS problems. I apologize to anyone in the SLIS lab this afternoon who had to listen to me.

But I fixed things. Eventually. I have learned that it doesn’t always pay to try to grok somebody else’s CSS hack—just copy it, paste it, and let it run.

As I feared, there’s a slight color mismatch between my nice sidebar GIF and the browser’s background color on some monitors. (Did I mention that I’m not a graphic designer and don’t understand color theory?) But it’s not perceptible enough that I’m going to fuss over it.

Oh, and I have to actually give Dreamweaver some props. Yes, really. Turns out, if you set up CSS distinctions based on class and id, Dreamweaver is smart enough to figure out which elements you’ve used that set of attribute values on. If you click on the element, right-click on it in the bottom pane, and select “Set class to…” you get the appropriate list of classes. This is actually pretty darn cool. Go Dreamweaver.

Addendum: I feel slightly better at not being the only coder whose language turns color: blue on occasion. And in other news, my quicklinks bar has broken… again…

It looks as though the primary documentation we will be handing our InfoArch client is a set of Dreamweaver templates, and while I fully intend to supplement that with real written documentation and plain-HTML templates, I fear I have to give in on this point.

So I have a question for y’all Dreamweaver gurus. Is it possible to make one lone attribute value editable?

The reason I’m asking is that I want to do CSS submenus via IDing the submenus in the navigation bar, and showing them only when that ID matches the value of class on body. (If that was Greek to you: trust me, it works.) But if I can’t get a Dreamweaver user to edit class on body appropriately, all is for naught.

See, this is the danger (she complained bitterly) of hiding code from people. A perfectly simple, easy-to-explain code change—I mean, how hard is it to understand “Make sure the value of class on the body tag matches the section of the website that the new page is part of”—cannot be accomplished because we’re all paranoid about letting people see angle brackets. Oo, scary.

It’s not a huge deal if this doesn’t work out. The menus on this site are simple enough that submenus are gravy, not meat and potatoes. If they get left out, that’s fine. Still, I’d like to make this work, and I can’t if Dreamweaver stands in my way.

Update: All hail the LazyWeb. Two people wrote to say yes, this is possible, but only in the very very latest version of Dreamweaver. To do it, make with the clicky on Modify –> Templates –> Make Attribute Editable. Thanks!

I added the “label table” to my growing information-architecture toolbox last week. Genuinely a clever idea, I thought, and simple as only the best clever ideas are.

What you do is make a table of your navigation-link text against the title elements and on-page main heads of the pages it points to. If you’re being inconsistent about what things are called, the label table makes that jump right out at you.

It occurs to me that compiling a label table on an existing site ought to be really bloody simple to program. So simple that I am tempted to program it myself. I’m a wimp about parsing HTML for sense, so I’d probably insist that the navigation structure (whatever it is) have a class attribute whose value is handed to the program as an argument. Algorithm for finding main page head: first <h1> if any present, else largest <font> on page, else first words on page. No worries. And the rest doesn’t seem difficult at all.

Famous last words… and I really don’t have time for this, either. But it’d be a nifty little utility. LazyWeb?

Internet Explorer version 5 for Windows is, quite simply, the evil and gangrenous spawn of innumerable purulent fiends dwelling in festering miasmas of bile-soaked slime.

That is all.

No, it isn’t. You know what? I’m tempted to figure out how to bar it from my sites. Pfeh. You want to read me, get a real browser or a news aggregator.

Well, the textartisan.com markover is almost done, except for the OEB FAQ and testing on Those Other Browsers That Aren’t Mozilla-Based. (Drat them. Wish they’d all go away. It looks fan-frickin’-tastic in Firebird.) I still have to write the contact page and the services page, but I know what I want on them, and they shouldn’t take long.

Once again, I must credit the talented Laura Blalock for shoring up my nonexistent design sense. She really did a phenomenal job.

Update: Okay, the sales pitch is written and up, and now none of the main navigation links will 404. (Or should, at any rate. If one does, something is exceedingly wrong and I would appreciate a quick email.)

I love TAG’s logo. It just rocks my socks. No, I didn’t design it; I could never come up with anything that good. Nicole Bratt designed it. And it’s absolutely perfect. I half think I restarted TAG (aside from tax-accounting issues) just so I could finally use that rockin’ logo.

OEB FAQ. Must redo OEB FAQ. Not looking forward to it. But must. Before next Wednesday. Grrr. Would really like to take it down, as the OEBPS is moribund if not actually buried, but the FAQ has been cited in print and everything, so I don’t quite feel right banishing it into the outer darkness of 404dom.

Simon Willison is doing a really terrific series on CSS web design. Pop by his blog and check it out. Simon writes good tutorial—step-by-step, example-driven, and bloody well-written. I am taking notes—and not on CSS.

Are the blog notification services wonky this week or is it just me? I missed three posts in the series because I didn’t realize Simon’s blog had updated.

I haven’t forgotten about the Movable Type series, by the way. I need to do a couple-three more hacks on my recreation of the default Movable Type design, and then I’ll be ready to get going again.

In my copious spare time, I have been devoting a cycle or two to what I’m going to do to textartisan.com.

Had a thought yesterday that’s just interesting enough to maybe try doing: page is a big square “A”, with the top and sides a contrasting color to the body, and the navbar acting as crosspiece. Should fit nicely with TAG’s logo (which is wizard cool—had it professionally designed a while ago, and am just itching to use it finally), and be a subtle reinforcement of the A-for-artisan idea.

Plus it’s functional and code-able, always a plus.

Still dunno what the color scheme will be, though I’m attracted to warm-tan backgrounds for some reason. I’ll code it up in black-and-white first, worry about colors later.

Well, in response to my question yesterday about preferred styles of archive navigation, seems I am all alone. In fact, the tone of some responses indicates that I am not only alone, my point of view is an offense unto the good names of blogging and information architecture alike.

Seems not unlikely. So I apologize for any offense or confusion caused, and I also apologize to those who find my weekly archive unnavigable.

A weird problem I’m having with Phoenix lately underscores the desirability of easy-access blog archives.

For some reason, Phoenix is over-relying on cached copies of some blogs. (Yes, tried clearing cache; thank you come again.) Sometimes I can override it by going to the full blog URL instead of the index to whatever directory the blog lives in (e.g. http://yarinareth.net/caveatlector/index.html instead of http://yarinareth.net/caveatlector/).

Sometimes I can’t, and the only way I can read the latest posts is by hitting the archives. (Seems to happen to Blogspot blogs a lot; dunno why.)

I’m gonna pick on Mark here, ’cuz he won’t up and kill me. To get to a particular post in Mark’s archive, I have to click three times: once on the Archives link on the main page, once on the month link, and once on the post I want to read in Mark’s calendar view. (Clicking on a day in Mark’s calendar view only gives me excerpts, not full posts.)

Whereas to read the latest archives on my blog, one need only click the appropriate link in my sidebar.

Not only is Mark’s indirection an annoyance, it’s a waste of expensive bandwidth—diveintomark.org has to serve me up two pages I don’t want so that I can get to the page I do want. I’ll lay odds Mark wastes more bandwidth on these intermediate pages than I do by using weekly archives instead of individual-post archives—though, I hasten to say, there is no way to test this assertion because I don’t even have individual-post archives.

Maybe it’s that I read too damn fast, but individual-post archives never fail to annoy me. When I’m trying to catch up on a blog, as for example after my trip to Indiana a while back, I hate having to click on individual post links. Hate it hate it hate it. Larger date-based chunks, please.

Am I all alone here, or does this irk anyone else?