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Re: Chelume - My Conlang website up.

From:Caleb Hines <cph9fa@...>
Date:Thursday, January 8, 2004, 18:49
> <noises of annoyment>: You've used a frame! Argh.
Is that a problem? I've only used it to keep a single consistent navigational bar across the top. I thought all modern browsers supported frames? Darn non-IE browsers. Can't they all just get along? I don't have access to any other browsers at home to test it with (except a reeeally old version of Netscape which I rarely use and whcih doesn't allow stylesheets at all and which chokes on most JavaScript). I could try testing the pages with the current version of Netscape at school in a couple of days, but I'm not sure how much it will help. Won't it either look good in one browser and bad in another, or vice-versa? I figured so many people use IE I might as well cater to the vast majority. I'll bet when you get to the Alphebet page, you get nothing but the XML source code. If so, I can't help you there, because I'm keeping the XML no matter what! ;P
> That aside, I'm also getting horizontal scrolling > which might be from the h2, but might not be.
Odd. I'm not sure I can fix that one either. The h2's are set to 100% width, which, in IE, makes them span 100% of the non-padded width of the bordered div. If there is horizontal scrolling it probably means that your browser is interpreting 100% as 100% of the screen, in which case the total page width, along with the padding and margins, would be greater than 100%.
> Also, a couple of times you have 'width: 97%;%;'.
Certainly an error that got propagated by copy-paste. Fixed.
> For maximum brilliance, you should aschew fixed > measurements like pixels, and especially measurements > like points, centimetres etc... > > ...Instead, you should use relative measurements such > as 'small', percentages or things like em and ex which > are relative to the fontsize.
I thought I tried to use percentages most of the place. Looking back at the style sheet, I find that most of the places where I use pixels are small things like padding and border (for example, a one pixel border around images). These kind of things would seem to be better left to pixels? But I did go back and change most (all but two) of them to percentages. One thing I did test is resetting my screen to its lowest resolution (to the detriment of my desktop-icon sorting scheme!). The page still loked good in IE at low resolution.
> On a related note, don't use 'this site' as > link text. It's totally meaningless. I'd > recommend 'Mark Rosenfelder's Language > Construction Kit', or just 'Language > Construction Kit'.
Good idea. So changed.
> Sorry to be picky, but I prefer people to > learn things the right way is all.
Quite alright. These stylistic/conventional things are the stuff they don't each us in class. Like I remember my teacher assuring us that nothing was wrong with using frames.
> It does look reasonably good, though,
Thanks, even though you haven't seen the alphabet yet. BTW, be forewarned that the graphics on the alphabet page are bmp's because they're easier to edit with M$ Paint (which is what I drew them with). I do hope to convert them soon to gif's.
> There doesn't seem to be all that much there, the 'Alphabet', > 'Grammar' and 'Vocabulary' in the top frame aren't linked. > I presume this is accidental?
?!? Yes they are linked... Perhaps the problem is that I purposely put the anchor tags around the td's instead of just the text, which, in IE at least, allows you to use the entire table cell as a link. Nonetheless, I have directly linked the text now, instead of the cells. -sigh- And I thought linking table cells was a neat trick.
> One thing: why would you give away at the end of the page > that it is a work of fiction? Wouldn't it be much more fun > to make people actually believe that it is all true?
For some reason, doing that just rubs me the wrong way. Besides, its really pretty clear from the rest of the document that its just a fiction. I mean, how likely are CS and a MusicEd majors to be able to find an undocumented book, deciepher it, linguistically analyze it, etc... Also, I used a touch of humor - the "English monk's" name is "A. Nonimus" < "Anonymous" which would give it away. Thanks, ~Caleb

Replies

Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
vaksje <vaksje@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Garth Wallace <gwalla@...>
Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>