dummied

Odds and ends

At a glance

This entry was written on January 13, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled Paring Down.

The entry following this is entitled Zenphoto 1.0.1 (beta).

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This entry has been tagged as Blogs, CSS, Newspapers, Work, XHTML, javascript.

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I'm knee deep in CSS, XHTML and one of my first forays into the dark, mysterious world of javascript and DOM scripting, but I thought I'd gather up a few notes of interest that have been piling up around my desk.

New things for the toolbox

The past three sites I have started working on have moved much quicker than the process it to took to code this one. CSS-wise, I can thank two new coding practices.

The first is to make sure that, unless absolutely required, I declare no margin or padding on any element that I have to give a width to. Before, half my time in the debug stage was just hacking the box model to get things to look reasonably right in Internet Explorer. Now, I open things up and they generally look close (except for IE 5.5 ... which is buggy beyond belief).

The other big CSS-specific coding help was adding a simple rule to the top of every new stylesheet I start: * {margin: 0; padding: 0;}. Just by zeroing out all the default margins and padding, I've cut the time it takes me to get things more or less squared up by as much as two-thirds in some cases.

Add in a beta-testing copy of CSSEdit 2 (I'm not sure that I'm allowed to say much about it aside from mentioning that, even in beta and missing much of the visual editors, it has supplanted its earlier version as my CSS coding program of choice), and the CSS side of things, while not quite caught up to the ease with which I find myself writing semantic XHTML, is coming easier and quicker than I had previously imagined possible.

DOM, DOM, DOM

I've mentioned before that I haven't done any hardcore programming (which XHTML and CSS obviously aren't) since I was a freshman in college and still trying to become a chemical engineer nearly a decade ago. Before that computer engineering course involving compilers and whatnot, I used to be a pretty fair scholastic BASIC programmer.

Nowadays, any programming muscles have completely atrophied to the point where Perl is driving me nuts and PHP's not far behind out the door.

I've also been trying to wrap my head around Javascript and DOM scripting for a while now.

Until I get a better grasp of a lot of it, though, I'm having to rely on the copy-and-paste¹ solutions others have already posted across the internet such as Nifty Corners and AHAH (like AJAX, only simpler and with much less overhead ... which is a good thing if you ask me).

Each of those is getting prominent usage in at least one of the big projects I mentioned in my last entry.