This page is the development journal for the web pages I'm building for a UML class and for the JS practice I'm doing. So there are lots of long, boring discussions about problems I encountered and the solutions I tried to implement. This may well have little interest to you all, but it will have interest to me when I find I need to remember how or why I did something before.
text-align: right; on my large-size 3-column style sheet when, naturally, I meant text-align: left;. I wonder if I'll ever learn the difference between right and left. I suppose not at my age. Whatever, I'm humiliated that I claimed to have made my "classmates" page look less stupid, when in fact, it probably looked more stupid.lastAT is different from lastAt, but couldn't seem to find that problem in my code for the longest time). Then I tried relearning enough about regular expressions so that I could parse the e-mail address to see if it had a valid format. I didn't get all that far, but made a little progress. In the end, I'm going to have to back off, I think.onfocus="this.select();" to each of the fields, and fixed a missing name in one of the <label> tags.I'm not sure I understood the second project correctly. I thought one was supposed to make a pop-up that asked for info, and then display that info on the front page. One of my classmates, however, used a window.prompt() function to get a name and then displayed the results from the prompt in a pop up. So I figured out how to do that. I've put the name both in a pop-up and on the regular page.
I wanted to make a pop-up form to retrieve the data, but didn't succeed in getting the info tranferred properly. I need to learn more about the get method.
Then too, I wanted to do all the work without having embedded scripts in any given page, but I didn't makage to do that either. Perhaps I'll manage it eventually, or perhaps it's a dumb idea.
I noticed that IE seemed a bit slow. Actually, my whole computer got slow after I was forced to upgrade to IE6 from my defective version of IE5. Anyway, I got out a timer and timed the time between clicking a link to one of the choices on my pop-up test page and the time the pop-up appeared. Opera and FF displayed all pop-ups within a second. IE, otoh, took 7–10 seconds to display a pop-up. Actually, I did have one test in which it took a whopping 27 seconds to display the default pop-up.
This is silly. Yes, I'm hardware limited, but I do have a 550 MHz PIII processor and 320 MB RAM. It's not like I'm running a 486 or something.
The problem is that if I fix the width of the center content, IE will make it disappear if the view port gets too small. That's because IE doesn't handle overflow correctly. So the solution, naturally, is not to specify width for the center content. This situation can get ridiculous, so standards compliant browsers allow one to specify minimum widths, but not IE (and from what I've read, IE7 won't support this property either).
Anyway, my previous approach was to fix the width of the center content block to a very small value so that IE would render properly in screens down to about 400 px wide. One problem with this is that my small content block was centered incorrectly in standards compliant browsers.
The reason it was centered incorrectly was that the container that held the content block expanded across the screen to encompass the right block. It is supposed to do this. But then the centering of the content block was to the margin, not between the two columns (i.e. within the expanded container block -- the container block was required so I could have my content block centered in IE5). To center the content block between the two columns, I needed to pull in the right margin of the content container so that it would keep the content container from expanding across the left column. This approach, however, caused IE to blank out my content when I had a fixed-width content block.
So the solution is to have a style sheet for small screens, say below 600 or 700 px in which the content block has no width at all. That means it can get ridiculously small, but people will have to cope. The upside is that I can now pull in the right margin so that the content block will be centered between the columns.
The downside of all this, of course, is that in wide screens, the content will get too wide. That's why I'll need to serve up a different style sheet for people with high screen resolution. But with high screen resolution, IE won't make my content disappear if I fix the width of the content block appropriately.
Nope, I'm reusing the same window. When I load a new pop-up into an existing window, it retains the dimension it had before.
IE won't scroll the content without scroll bars. Opera will allow me to scroll with the mouse wheel or cursor keys.
I still need to figure out how to place it. IE places the pop up fairly high on the screen, but Opera centers the tot of the pop up on the center of the useful viewing area. That's not much use to me. Then I have to move things to see things. So that's why IE folks don't squawk. They don't see what I see. Not a surprise, really.
<h1> off to the side. The problem for me was to get the logo inside a yellow box with the rest of the stuff in the sepia box with yellow printing. The final result is not flexible, so I'm not happy. <form> tag. I changed that to an id.