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kaseytraeger

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Everything posted by kaseytraeger

  1. It'll be about 11pm here on the west coast when the curtain is lifted, so if I can just keep my eyes open ...
  2. Our family "suffers" the same "problem" -- my hubby has a Toyota pickup and a Kawasaki ZX-11 sport bike. I don't hold it against him, though ... Toyota makes long-lasting automobiles that are relatively problem free. I can't speak for the Kawasaki brand because I don't know much about it, but the ZX-11 has >40,000 miles on it, so that's saying something!
  3. A hearty congratulations are in order!!! And a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the new baby, Nathan (a Happy Birthday party hat!)
  4. How exciting to have purchased your first car! What a thrill! My first car purchase took place when I was 18, and boy was it exciting. It was a used 1985 GMC S-15 Jimmy. That thing, although a fun vehicle (and very good looking once I had it painted a metallic royal blue color) was a gutless wonder. I'd drive down to Los Angeles, and when driving up the grapevine, the large semis would pass me like I was a snail! It was a great off-road vehicle, though. Thumbs Up My only vehicles since then have been a 1999 Chevy ZR-2 Blazer (leased), and now a 1989 Chevy Silverado Blazer, full-size (I own it outright, baaaaaby -- no more leasing for me -- once burned, twice shy). I wish I could say that I've had an unblemished record as a real country girl who has only owned Chevy/GM 4-wheel-drive vehicles, but the very first car my parents let me drive when I was 16 was their 1973 Beetle. So much for my down-home image! It was still fun, though, because I almost backed over one of my friends in the high school parking lot, so from then on, they called it the "Hell Bug" instead of the "Love Bug." Anyway, I'm lost in my own reverie. Congratulations on your new car! (And big kudos that you're a right-winger... I thought I was the only one out there!)
  5. Bunni, I'm glad you've decided to step into the CSS world. I've only been doing this for a few weeks, and I've got a world of information to learn, but I can honestly say that I feel better about the web pages I've done in CSS than anything prior. I think it's because I'm one of those very I AM A SPAMMER programmer types (one of my bachelor's degrees in college was computer engineering, which is a mix of electrical engineering and computer programming) and like to know that I'm doing my best to make my code clean and efficient. I think you've made a good decision to learn the ins and outs of CSS. I'm finding it a bit confusing to keep track of the quirks that each browser brings to the table, especially in the way they interpret CSS properties. The CSS Box Model Hack still has me struggling a bit, and I'm wondering how in the world these people come up with such ingenious ways to get each browser to interpret the properties correctly so that the web page is cross-browser consistent. (By the way, if you're interested in reading up on what I mean by the Box Model Hack, just type those three words into your favorite search engine and you'll be amazed at how much is out there.) The biggest challenge to me is layout using CSS, but I've visited the CSS Zen Garden web site and am really amazed that different people can take the same base HTML document and get such widely different web pages based on their use of style sheets. It's really neat. I figured that if they can do it, I can too. It will probably just take some time and experience to get as good as those people, though. Anyway, I'm blathering on. Just wanted to say I think you've made a good decision, and I'm glad to have been an encouraging factor!
  6. To Jim and Ty -- First, thank you for taking time out of your day to look at my code. Jim, I haven't been on the forums since the wee early morning hours of 02/28, so I didn't see your post until just this evening. I wish I had seen that it was just a matter of adding a z-index property! How much hassle would that have saved me?!? (And thank you very much for the compliment about how the page looks. It's been a slow, somewhat arduous process learning how to lay out all the pieces, but I think it's finally coming together. You've been a very important part of my learning, and for that I give you big thanks! Soon, I'll be adding random pictures of different menu items, and I'm sure that will add a new bumper crop of layout issues to tackle. But for now, I'm going to show the menu as-is to the restaurant owner and get his take on it.) Based on what Ty discovered about the position:absolute and position:relative, I fiddled and faddled with the web page for a few hours, finally falling into a solution that seems to work (in IE5+ and NS6.2, at the very least, since those are the two browsers I currently have installed on my computer). Of course, I've also got a lunch menu and a beverages & desserts menu, each of which had to be modified, as well, especially the beverages menu (because it has only a single, I AM A SPAMMER column going right down the center of the page). May I ask how Ty's observation about the position:absolute caused you to think that it was a problem with the z-index? I don't quite see the relation between those two properties. Thanks again to both of you for providing great help and taking time out of your day to look at my problem. I really do hope that one day soon I'll be much, much more competent at CSS and can actually start doing troubleshooting of other people's sites like you both do. Kind of a way to pay back the TCH family, ya know?
  7. boxturt, Your finding is interesting. I have one to add to that ... If I turn the big wooden graphic that says "The Village Pantry Est. 1949" into a link, it functions properly as a link! The only thing that separates the navigation bar from the rest of the page content is that the navigation bar is its own <div>. But I don't see what's wrong with the #navigation <div> to make it do that... Another test I tried was to remove the <ul> and <li> from the navigation bar. I simply included the images as normal images with <br /> between each image. Even that didn't work, so I don't think it has anything to do with displaying the graphics as list elements. Have you any other thoughts about other avenues I can try? My wonderful hubby wants to get me out of the house for a few hours because I've been bashing my head on my desk over this, so I'll be out for a while. But I'll check back in here as soon as I get back. Thanks for taking a look at this for me. I certainly appreciate it!
  8. Good evening to all the TCH family! I hope you've had a wonderful week and are looking forward to an even better weekend. I'm looking at a rainy weekend of XHTML and CSS coding as I continue to work on the restaurant web site I've been developing over the past couple of weeks. I've found something in one of my web pages that works properly in Internet Explorer but does not work properly in Netscape. If you visit the page Village Pantry Breakfast Menu, you will see a navigation menu in the left-hand column. Each of the stockpot images is supposed to be a link to another web page. If you open this page in Internet Explorer, you will see that the links work correctly. I've put in some dummy links as placeholders for the time being, so if you click on one link, you'll get to Google, another takes you to Yahoo!, another to MSN and the fourth one to TCH (how could I forget my favorite web host in the whole wide world?). These links work properly in Internet Explorer. If you open the web page in Netscape, the stockpot images don't even register as a link! Clearly, this is a very bad thing because how are people supposed to navigate the web site if they can't use any links?!? I don't see anything wrong with my code for the navigation bar. It's a simple <ul> with each graphic as an <li> within the <ul>. The base skeleton for the navigation bar looks like this. ><ul> <li><a href=" ... "><img src=" ... " /></a></li> <li><a href=" ... "><img src=" ... " /></a></li> <li><a href=" ... "><img src=" ... " /></a></li> <li><a href=" ... "><img src=" ... " /></a></li> </ul> This should work just fine, shouldn't it? Please take a look at the web page and it's associated code. I'd appreciate any comments and suggestions you have to offer. Thanks so much! Have an absolutely wonderful, fun weekend!!!
  9. Thanks for the links! Boy, iStockPhoto has a lot of graphics! Has anyone ever actually tried to look at them all? I can only imagine it would take several days!!! Why haven't I seen BlueVertigo before?!? It's great. Lots and lots of links to stock photography and other resources. Again, thanks for the links! There's plenty of fodder there to play around with.
  10. nortk, This was the first time I had tried using CSS to replace tables when designing a web page. I can tell you from my newbie, first-time experience that I found it to be more labor-intensive up front than using tables. However, this is probably because it was the first time I had tried doing this, and I'm also still in the early phases of learning CSS. What I have found that gives me a great amount of glee is this -- once I had laid out the page, I began fiddling with some of the properties of each CSS element involved in creating the "table." By making very minimal modifications to the CSS elements, I could completely change the look and feel of the page, the size of the "table," etc. It was great! Aside from wanting to start off on the right foot by using CSS and designing to web standards, I was also motivated to use CSS instead of tables because of the very fact that a small amount of editing can produce drastically different pages. If I had tried to do this with tables, I would have had to edit each and every <table>, <tr>, <td>, <th> tag, etc. Basically, you have so much more control over your web pages using CSS than you could ever have begun to dream about using tables. Believe me, I've been building web pages for fun for since 2000, and each one used tables, so I know first-hand what a pain it is to modify a web page when you have to go through and change each tag one by one. The web site that I'm currently working on is the first site I've done that is based on pure CSS (i.e., no tables). Jim (aka btrfld) and many other people here at TCH have been extremely helpful in the advancement of my CSS education. I will never go back to tables. Especially if you're developing a template that you plan on using more than once, the extra time you take to learn CSS upfront will be a big time-saver for you later on! If you want to see some really cool stuff CSS can do (some if which is impossible with tables), you can visit Eric Meyer's CSS/Edge. I was really inspired by this site. P.S. -- Be sure to read the book that Jim (btrfld) has suggested. If you don't want to buy it until you've had a chance to look it over, your local library most surely has a copy. Our local library has 3 copies, and I'm in the queue at position #14 waiting to get it! That shows you the amount of interest in this subject.
  11. My personal taste is to use pop up windows. But you need to forewarn your users that images will appear in a pop-up window. You can do this, as TCH-Don has suggested, using the alt tag for images, or you can make a statement to that effect somewhere on your web page (where it's easy to see). It's generally an accepted courtesy and wise netiquette to advise users when pop-up windows will appear. But beyond that, many people now have pop up blockers in their browsers (I personally have a Google toolbar and a Yahoo! toolbar attached to my browser toolbar, both of which block pop-ups). They'll need to know to expect pop-up windows so they can temporarily disable their pop-up blockers. One of the things I like about using pop-ups in this case (versus opening it in the same window) is that you view more than one image at a time in multiple pop-up windows.
  12. I have a feeling that when you dramatically reduced the browser window size, it forced the lines that weren't indenting correctly to wrap into a second line of text. If so, then that would fit with my findings that Netscape handles the padding/indentation properly if you add enough text to a single line to create a word-wrapped line. In any event, if you ever remember where you found that little blurb about Netscape not handling padding percentages properly, please post a link. I'm very curious to read what the article has to say, even though you say it was a bit outdated. Maybe this is an issue that Netscape hasn't yet addressed.
  13. I agree with both TCH-Bruce and james8547 that the best approach is to use a link that will open a separate window to display the graphic. However, you may want to at least consider using thumbnails for some of the more important pictures. I personally find it helpful to be able to quickly scan graphics, and if I want more detail, to click on the graphic and see a larger, clearer image. However, I'm not sure what your target audience is. If they are on basic dial-up service, then loading thumbnails may slow down your site's loading speed, thereby causing some of your users to move on. In this case, then TCH-Bruce and james8547 are absolutely correct -- stick with text links. I don't think I've added much to the mix, but at the very least, you've got a third opinion!
  14. Hi everyone, I need some stock photography, images and/or graphics that are royalty- and copyright-free (I will be modifying them to create some backgrounds and do some Photoshop tutorials). My photography skills are basically non-existent, so I need to rely on some skilled people for photos. Subject matter is not important, as long as it's not pornographic or otherwise offensive. Does anyone know of a good web site or two that offers this? I don't want any copyright infringement problems, so I prefer web sites that clearly state that the images are for public consumption and that the copyright rights have been waived. Thanks! Kasey
  15. Well, I tried changing my .indent class to reflect a 10 pixel left padding rather than a 7% left padding. It works quite well! I'm still curious, however, why Netscape choked on this one. Before I made the final change to the page, however, I noticed something that I found puzzling ... when I looked at the page in Netscape, one thing that stood out to me was that if the indented line was a single line long (i.e., the line was not long enough to wrap to the next line), the indent class did not work. When the indented line wrapped around and had to be placed on two more more lines, the indent class worked fine. So I did a little test. I took one of my short, "single" lines that were supposed to be indented (but weren't) and added about a dozen words so that I would know the browser would have to wrap the text. Sure enough, the Netscape browser correctly applied the indent class now that the text had to be wrapped to another line. Anyone ever seen this behavior from Netscape before? I'm wondering why it will work wonderfully when a line of text wraps but chokes when the line of text sits fine on a single line. I'm also still wondering about that strange effect in Internet Explorer that causes breaks in the border of one of my divs. Maybe there's a work-around for that one, too. (I cringe at the thought of work-arounds, but I guess they are sometimes the only thing available to get the necessary effect.) Kasey
  16. I will try the pixel work-around for the indentation and see what I get. Will let you know... Kasey P.S. -- Thanks to Jim and Kris for helping on this!!!
  17. Hello everyone! I'm working on an online menu for a local restaurant, and in trying to make the online menu look as identical to the print version as possible, I've come across two strange quirks -- one is unique to IE and the other to NS. You can view the page in question at: Village Pantry Breakfast Menu The IE quirk: In the very first section of the menu, there is a boxed area with the "specials". When you scroll the page up and down in IE, portions of the border simply disappear and make the border choppy. I've never seen this kind of destruction to a div border, so I'm pretty much crossing my eyes like this little guy -- The NS quirk: Several entries in the menu need to be indented from their header. I've created the following class to handle the indenting: >.indent{ padding-left:7%;} (You will see this class in the attached style sheet called "base_style.css") All of the entries requiring indentation are preceded with a dash "-" (see the Village Pantry Breakfast Menu to see which menu items are in question). Amazingly, Internet Explorer gets all of the indentations correct. Netscape, however, only indents two of them, leaving the rest of them fully left-justified. Has anyone ever experienced this NS quirk? It's rather annoying. Please feel free to download the page code for more detailed examination. It's rather messy because I tried to create the menu using CSS instead of tables (I'm bound and determined to stay away from tables). That makes the page look like there's a lot more going on than really is. I will be more than happy to explain what each CSS element means and clarify any questions you have about the general layout. I'm attaching one of the CSS style sheets, base_style.css, to this message (I had to convert it to a text file to upload it. For some reason, I couldn't upload a css file directly). There is a second style sheet, menu_style.css, that I will attach to another message. This is going to be a pain in the neck to troubleshoot, but hopefully there is a brave soul out there somewhere who will be willing to tackle it! Thanks a bunch! Kasey
  18. Big Gorilla- Just wanted to let you know that Jim really knows what he's talking about here. He helped me with the same problem (if not exactly the same, then it was *extremely* similar) just about a week ago. He was a great help to me! Jim- Again, you say you're not a CSS master, but you've helped out yet another person! Kasey
  19. TCH-Glenn, I read the article you posted by Dan Cederholm. I must say I was quite surprised at his seeming "simple" method for creating full-length columns. In fact, before Jim provided his solution, I had worked Cederholm's method and actually got the layout correct. I was thrilled! I need to decide now which method to use on the web site I'm designing. Hmm, decisions, decisions .... Now I've got two methods of accomplishing the same thing. This is good info to have because you always want more than one way to skin a cat, eh?!? Kasey
  20. Jim, I must say that I am thoroughly impressed with the way you handled this web page. I tried doing the same thing you did, but all I got was the nav column on top with the rest of the content positioned below the nav column. Also, when I did it, the plaid background took over the page instead of being situated behind the nav bar with solid pink everywhere else on the page. I have a few questions about what your work. So here goes. (1) You added some "voice-family" properties to the menu. I've not seen these before. Are they for web surfers who are blind and using a audible program to surf the web? (2) You have a property that's coded like this: html>body #menu { ... } What does the greater-than sign do? [bowing before the feet of Jim, the CSS master] Thanks Jim! Kasey
  21. Mitch, It's good to have you back. Happy days are here again! Kasey
  22. First, I want to say thanks to TCH-Bruce, TCH-Glenn and btrfld for taking the time to look at my problem. I've had a busy time of it these past few days, so I'm just now getting around to looking at your responses. From TCH-Glenn's links, I can see that I've got some reading to do. Also, thank you, btrfld, for posting your revised page for me to look at. However, when I click on the link, I get an error message from my browser telling me that it can't find the page. Is it still located at http://olifields/tchtester/ktvp/? Thanks, everyone! Kasey
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