Rebuild Maljonic's Website

[Maljonic]

Of course, how silly of me. Thanks.

 

[Shovel]

Last I checked, you should avoid sending the <?xml ?> prefix to Internet Explorer as it puts that browser into ‘Quirks’ mode. It's a bug, and it's fixed in IE7, but it will be harder to use CSS positioning in IE if you don't start with a DOCTYPE on the first line.

It's only ‘required’ if you set the MIMETYPE as application/xhtml+xml, if you're sending the page as text/html then web browsers are treating it as HTML anyway.

 

[Maljonic]

That's a bit annoying, Dreamweaver 8 puts that in automatically, bloody IE!

 

[Shovel]

I can only assume that Dreamweaver has a preference to determine auto-inclusion of the XML prologue because my copy of DW8/Mac doesn't put it in when creating XHTML documents.

The XML prologue is required to create a valid XML document, thus if you're sending XHTML as HTML (which most of us are, bad us) then you can happily leave it out until such a time that the most popular version of Internet Explorer is less shit. However, if for some reason you're using XHTML 1.1 or 2.0, these must be served with an XML mimetype, so they need the prologue.

Since the XHTML mimetype isn't rendered by IE though, it's not a lot of use (without using content negociation: as described on HTML Dog)

 

[Maljonic]

Is there a way to stop content flowing outside divs, like on this page with the Marcia Friedman image, in Firefox etc, or is it something that can't be avoided?

 

[Shovel]

You mean horizontally, I assume?

Setting a min-width for the containing div can help, if you know the size of the largest horizontal item in the div.

Alternatively, you can use overflow-x to hide or scroll overflowing horizontal content.

min-width is the way to go, though and should keep the layout under control at most reasonable font sizes. Only when a single word becomes larger than the div width would it overflow, then.

(Also, there seems to be a bit of a bug when I resize text in Firefox: Your sidebars both get wider, and therefore the central page content gets squished smaller.)

Ben

 

[Shovel]

Also, if it's the image pushing out of the side that causes the most common issue, you can set a max-width of 100% on <img/> contained within your body div. If the browser window is resized too small, the image will scale down.

 

[Maljonic]

Thanks I didn't know you could do that with images, very useful.

 

[Maljonic]

Oh yea, just tested the Firefox (and Netscape) resize thing and it does make the sidebars bigger. It works okay in Opera though, I guess 'cause that zooms everything, hmm.

 

[Maljonic]

Well I officially finished this today, just now actually. Removed tables, put everything on templates with css for different sections and put files in sensible folders to keep it ordered (using redirects of course). Even got rid of some tables that I didn't think were needed on the message board.

There's bound to be a couple of glitches I'll discover (like the columns getting bigger when you resize text bigger, haven't fixed that yet) but it's all templated and styled now so it shouldn't be any trouble to fix them.

Started November 30th 2005, finished January 23rd 2006 - just under two months, feels like I've been doing it forever.

 

[Shovel]

Congratulations Mal.

 

[Maljonic]

Thanks, I just noticed the message board (phpbb2) validates HTML Transitional too, which a year or so ago I would have thought impossible.