Yesterday: Heads down in CSS

I spent all yesterday (when I wasn’t in class) working on the CSS redesign of the site. I was about ready to give up on being able to view it in Netscape 4 until I found this site, which offers a free stylesheet for a fluid three-column layout (fluid meaning it resizes to fill the available browser width).

I had to tweak it a bit because of the Manila calendar. Manila automatically renders the calendar as a table, so it doesn’t resize. This is a problem with small browser width as it extends past the edge of the navigation div. I had to make the left navigation fixed width to solve the problem. This in turn meant the middle and right divs overlap at some smaller browser widths. I’ll do some work in 800×600 today to see if I can isolate the problem.

But most of the structural work is done. Now I can move on to aesthetics — colors, border widths, font leading — oh yeah, you can do leading, aka line height, in CSS. This old digital typographer is thrilled.

more…