August 21, 2006
More Minor Changes
You may notice that I’ve altered the category pages a little: they’re now proper XHTML 1.0 Strict (or at least the basic structure is: individual posts inside it may not be ... I’ve spent hours already correcting some of my most egregious early habits in HTML). They also have a nice (at least, I think it’s nice) table of contents at the top that quickly shows you what’s on the page. I’ve also brought their style into line with the main site. I’m not quite sure I’m happy with the narrow column in the middle, but I couldn’t think of anything that really belonged in the right-hand column and the text seemed a little too wide otherwise. Right now, it’s set at 70ex, I think, which should be about right in whatever font you’re using.
*WARNING—Technical Rant beginning
Also, if you’ve been using IE to view this page, you may have just noticed some fairly drastic changes. For example, the blog posts are now centered on the screen. You are now seeing what the rest of us using sane browsers like Firefox have been seeing all along.
I’ve known that IE ignored my margin-left:auto, margin-right:auto for quite a while, but until tonight, I just threw up my hands and said “what can you do with a non-compliant browser?!?” Then I read this article, which seemed to imply that there was a way to turn on standards-compliance in IE. I was intruiged, but after reading the article, I was still mystified. My pages should have already been triggering that mode: all of them correctly identify themselves. Then I had a sneaking suspicion that IE’s coders had failed to account for the possibility of someone’s putting an xml declaration (like <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>) before the !DOCTYPE, which is the recommended but not required practice for XHTML. A quick test verified this to be the case. After one or two curses upon the coders of IE, I have removed the offending xml declaration from my pages and used the more standard meta declarations for my file encodings.
I’m still miffed, though. And my blog probably still isn’t rendering properly for users of IE 5. I can’t bring myself to care about that right now. Scholl would be proud of me. :)
