how now brownpau
I’ve lived wthout TV for almost four years, and I’m glad for it. One day, when I move into a new home, I may not get a TV at all. If I do, it will occupy a minor and non-obtrusive position in the household.
Curry tells us that blogs are better than TV. I read it in a weblog, so it must be true.
To handle the problem with CSS box widths and italicized text in IE5, I recommend any one of the following workarou- I mean, uh, measures:
– Use a background graphic, rather than box borders. This is the best solution when attempting precise alignment of borders with a title graphic. Yes, I know it eats up a few more bytes, and yes, I know it’s a waste of CSS capability, but do you want that CSS box to align or not?
– Don’t pad your boxes. Since some browsers put padding inside the width, while compliant browsers add the padding to the width, just leave the padding out of your CSS declarations. Instead, you can “simulate” padding by adding an inline “margin” style declaration inside the box DIV, like so… (It doesn’t always work, though.)
<div class="box">
<div style="margin: 0px 10px">
Hello! I'm padded!
</div>
</div>
– Use the box model hack. It’s a piece of genius, though I don’t recommend resorting to this, since it is a workaround to overcome IE5’s own shortcomings. But if you need it, there it is, and it works quite well. Just remember: in the years to come, truly compliant code will shun such hacks. (But then, I have feeling that hacks such as this will always be needed anyway.)
Tim adds his own stylesheet hack: “IE5+ understands “expressions”, so you can use the userAgent string to see if the browser is IE5.x, and if so, give it a different value.”
width: 400px ;
width: expression( navigator.userAgent.match( /MSIE 5/ ) ? "440px" : "400px" ) ;
And when all is said and done, CSS and italics in IE5/Win are still a problem.
(This lesson is provided to you for free from Brownpau’s School of Hard Knocks. Ow.)
Recently texted to me:
CONFUCIUS SAY: If you are upset with someone, put yourself in his shoes and walk a mile. So when he gets mad, you are a mile away and you will have his shoes.
One thing I really, REALLY hate about IE5 is that when you have italicized text of more than one line inside a CSS box, the box’s width is expanded by 1px or even more. To compensate, I’m forced to size my CSS boxes down to align with graphics (as with the remade Index 11), and just make sure an italicized entry is in the blog at all times. But I know that a compliant browser will show the actual width, darn it. How does number 11 look in IE5.5, IE6, or Mozilla? Is the box misaligned?
Update: Oh, wait. I finally figured out how the box model hack can help me in this. Oh, joy. Will tweak now.
All done. My life in pictures has been filed, scanned, categorized, and uploaded into a neat and scalable little package. That was tiring. Now I have to go send a money order to Richmond, VA, and maybe get a nice Bic Mac on the way.
In addition to the new Photo section, I also redid the Contact page, completely overhauled the Travel Journals, and moved the Travel pictures to their own albums. Check them out and tell me how you like them.
(More new photos coming tomorrow. Just one more stack to screen for scanning before I stuff them in my album. But right now, it’s time to sleep.)
Digging through all these photos has produced some fruit: my first Mirror Project entry. Now I feel hip and trendy.
WHAT?! Microsoft Weblogger?!
Know what day it is? It’s Paulo Redesigns his Photo Page Day! I’m going to spend the day going through a huge backlog of unfiled pictures, and sticking them into a cute “Japanese Teddy Bear” photo album. As I go along, I’ll scan the ones I like and upload them to the gallery.
(Oh, and I also hear there’s some sort of palindromic calendar date going on too. Yay. Whoopie.)
I linked Yam and the City. Go look. Cute layout!
Salary.com. Looks informative, but my ISP is timing out every two minutes. I’ll check it out when my connection stops being cranky. (link via Ev)
I had to go to Makati today, and instead of taking my usual route — jeep to South Expressway, then bus to Ayala — I opted for a more adventurous alternative: a jeep to Baclaran LRT, then the MRT at Edsa to Ayala Station. It’s a route I rarely take, except when I have time to spare and am in a daring mood.
After the jeepney turns onto Quirino Ave, about halfway to Edsa, the usable roadspace narrows as sidewalk stalls by the hundreds spill onto the street, with vendors hawking everything from anting-anting at gayuma (tribal lucky charms and love potions) to fake brandname jeans and plasticware. At some point the sheer human traffic slows the jeepney’s progress to a crawl, and it becomes faster to get out and walk.
And what a walk! The street market is an assault on all the senses: every stall blaring music from pirated CD’s, pools of foul-smelling water overflowing from the gutter, heat rising from the crush of people, and of course the variety of merchandise surrounding you.
It’s not a safe place. I once saw a snatcher try to grab a necklace from a young girl right in front of me, only to be spotted, caught, and beaten to a pulp by local police. Bombs have exploded in the area, set by terrorists or political destabilizers, killing dozens. And just once, I had to pass through the area at 1am in the morning, when the stalls are all dark and covered, and garbage is strewn all over the avenue: it’s more than a bit scary, knowing how the place is a breeding spot for drug addicts, muggers, and other unsavory criminal elements.
Towards Edsa, the market retreats back to the sidewalks, and the road becomes usable to vehicles again. All in all, the whole walk is a bit less than 10 minutes, from the Baclaran LRT station (where the market gets thick) to the Edsa MRT station at Edsa-Taft. Quite an experience.
Now I’m in Starbucks Glorietta. Seated here with a tall hot chocolate and surrounded by foreigners — and upper class locals trying to look/sound like foreigners — I feel like I’m in another world.