My wife approached me last Wednesday with the prospect of finally developing her website (her domain having already been registered in March). There was one big catch: It needed to go live before Tuesday the 10th. The rest of my week was already booked solid, what with Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday services, plus Easter dinner at my parents, etc. Somehow, I managed to piece together a coherent mass of code, and threw it online last night: Vatsana Design.

Right out of the starting block, she requested that the home page contain vertically-aligned content. I, wanting to accomplish this without the use of <table> elements, first downloaded and installed Dean Edwards’ IE7 script library, which basically forces IE 5 and 6 to behave like W3C-compliant browsers. It works wonders with positioning and also gives me the freedom to use certain CSS2 selectors such as > and +. (Both IE5 and 6 do not recognize these selectors natively.) Vertically-aligned content seemed deceptively simple, but I must have abandoned a couple design iterations before I found an implementation that worked.

I used to see this more often in the formative days of the Internet — sites allegiant to Microsoft IE would display a “best viewed with IE” animation, cough up a popup of some sort, or, in extreme cases, deny entry. Fleet.ford.com, when encountering a non-IE browser (such as my latest version of Firefox), implements a JavaScript function ironically titled “oldBrowserAlert”. It should be the other way around — old site alert, the superfluous “last updated” date notwithstanding. Just be thankful that the aforementioned web developers had the wit to limit this function in a cookie.

While the site may work just fine with Firefox, its worth noting that the developers (or their superiors) either 1.) either feel it’s alright to alienate approximately one-sixth of their audience (who use Firefox)^[1], or 2.) are oblivious to the situation.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading the name of the new Rolls-Royce coupe as the Phantom Dropdead, when all the while, it’s actually called the Drophead! Regardless, the car is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. I can dream, right?

I will be a married man in four days. Then, I’m off to Sint-Maarten for a bliss-filled week in the sun. But in the back of my mind… The final build of Firefox 2.0 may be released while I’m away, pending the success of Fx 2.0 RC3.

I’ve been working on three sites during the past few months, so I thought I’d officially “set them loose.”

• City Gate redesign
• Weichert, Aspen Hill MD
• Department of Energy Insight Portal (under wraps and in production)

Annie basically handed me the Weichert gig after recommending me to her boss. While initially designing the layout, I showed her the newly redesigned City Gate site. She like it enough to urge me to retain most of its design elements for the Weichert site. City Gate happened to be my first authentic PHP site, but I only really used the language for includes, the majority of which was just more HTML code.

While the brunt of the City Gate work came in the style and design, the majority of the Weichert work came in the PHP programming. I needed to create a site that was dynamic and able to do what I wanted it to, but at the same time, let people upload brochures and real estate disclaimers and have those files appear automatically and on the correct pages. I thought about creating a MySQL database in which every PDF had its own row of data, with the listing agent, state and address as applicable fields.

But on second thought, such a system would require one to interface with said database after every file upload. That would be a hassle and create another layer of potential human error. I realized that PHP was capable of dynamically displaying the correct files without a database, as long as the file names were strategically named, and uniform. PHP regular expressions now sort the contents of directories on the fly and eliminate the need to touch another line of code when a new PDF is uploaded.

Emil Stenström weighs in with why Inline CSS should not be allowed in strict doctypes:

Inline CSS goes against all the logic involved in the idea of two distinct doctypes. Why should you want to include design information inside of a document that you just explicitly stated would separate the two?

Remember that the word cascading appears in CSS. Inline styles, while not esthetically pleasing, nevertheless allow for economy of code.

If, for instance, you implement a style that appears only once on only one page, than an inline style makes sense. Or, if you find yourself implementing that style in multiple areas of your site, then by all means, place it in an external document.

The beauty of cascading style sheets is that a style can be implemented on a single tag, a single page, or multiple pages, depending upon your desired level of specificity.

I found an aberration today while using Bon Echo build 2006052616. I was clicking on a link to an html file, but the browser interpreted it as an object to be downloaded. A second later, I saw the file show up in my downloads window. I then tried opening up a blank page using about:blank and Bon Echo actually dumped a zero-length file called “blank” into my downloads directory. Hmm. A simple restart of the browser alleviated the problem, and I haven’t seen the anomaly since.

Mitchell Baker has a new post that actually explains me quite well:

…Many artists practice their art because the drive is in them and needs to get out. A set of programmers [has] the same internal drive. My husband is one — he will happily spend hours — days if he could — programming on his own, unrelated to any job or money.

I’d get home from a long day of sitting at my computer at work, and the first thing I want to do is fire up my home PC and start coding, developing, designing, etc. And I couldn’t care less if I’m not getting paid for it. Perhaps that’s my Achilles Heel.

Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 is out…

Mozilla late Tuesday began the push towards Firefox 2.0 with the release of Bon Echo Alpha 1, designed to give a preview of the company’s upcoming revision to its popular alternative web browser. One of the most notable new features of Firefox 2 will be its improved bookmark functionality, called Places.

Changes have also been made to tabbed browsing, support for SVG, and numerous bug fixes. While the release is not recommended for daily use, Mozilla is asking users to download, test, and provide feedback on the build. “The BonEcho Alpha 1 milestone is the first of many developer milestones on the path to Firefox 2,” Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering for Mozilla, said in a statement.

…but I’m wondering if 2.0 will ultimately support CSS3 border properties (e.g. border-radius). Currently, Firefox supports Mozilla-specific properties derived from CSS3; such properties are appended with “-moz”. Support for these properties without the “-moz” prefix will be a solid step in the right direction.

Annie just recently brought some bettas back to the townhouse. She’s in charge of taking care of them, cleaning their bowls, etc. However, I’ve been assigned the task of naming the little rascals (there’s eight of them): BlueBoo (a.k.a. “MSIE”), OpenOffice 2.0.1 (a.k.a. “Opie”), Mozilla, Firefox, Linus “Linux” Torvalds, Wikipedia, Launchy 4.2.0 (pictured), and Zippy (a.k.a “.tgz”).