Internal Server Error
what the voices in my head tell me to write
Friday, October 15, 2004
Nearly the weekend
Its 3:25 and I am bored stiff. I have a horrible feeling that I am going to get a load of work dumped on me sooner in a mad rush before the release of www.ingentaconnect.com. I keep getting up blind alleys with the JSTL code I am writing changing the functionality of some pages around. I get to the point where I have to have a change done to the handlers behind the scenes and I cant do that. Not that I want to really but its frustrating to say the least.
I just want to get all this out of the way really now. There isnt that much to be done but its really important stuff like the checkout and shopping cart. I did the designs for more of that in about August so I dont have any real input to it. At times I almost feel like a spare part right now. Some of the other guys are working all hours and I am not really working that hard at all.
I have spent a bit of time tidying up the graphics on the site. Things like buttons etc. It gives it a nice polish if nothing else. I did work for ages on the drop down menus the other day. It was really frustrating. There are two separate menus one of which was behaving fine and the other was all over the place in different versions of Gecko based browsers. In the end I tracked it down to setting the width property of the top level list elements to auto. Older Gecko rendering engines cant cope with this it seems. Well to be precise they cant cope with having content wider than the initial content appearing and floating outside of the intial content. It pushes the widths of the element all over the place ruining the layout.
Its one thing that IE seemed to get dead right and newer versions of Gecko like firefox > 0.9.3 were fine. The only fix I can come up with is to put in a pixel width for the top level li elements. Trouble is this is fiddly and also seems to be rendered differently in different Gecko browsers as well.
Its at times like this I could really do with some coffee
Permanent link and Comments posted by Rob Cornelius @ Friday, October 15, 2004
