Slime Update Archive - April 2003

My Plan

Internet Explorer 6.0/Win doesn’t support a lot of CSS that designers need. Other browsers such as Mozilla and IE5/Mac understand many of these things. For example, IE6/Win doesn’t support adjacent sibling selectors. There are a number of other similar things that it doesn’t support that I can’t remember right now.

However, there’s one thing it does support pretty well, although it doesn’t follow the related standards: CSS and JavaScript interaction. So here’s what I’m thinking: I can, in theory, write a script that will run only in IE6/Win, and will look for specific things in the style sheet - such as adjacent sibling selectors. With the script, I can then manually apply the style rules that IE6 is ignoring to every element that requires them. In this way, support for these standards can be emulated, and if the user has scripts turned on (which most do), they won’t know the difference. This can save designers from a lot of headaches.

With the free time that I should now have, since the semester is nearly over, I’ll be looking into this possibility. You can expect an update reasonably soon (maybe tonight, or maybe in a day or two).

Posted at 2 PM on April 30, 2003

A horse kicked me once. It hurt.

Over the past week or so I’ve become very inspired to create things. I’ve got lots of great ideas for things to do. Old projects to finish. JavaScript games to create. Web pages to make. Articles to write. Images to raytrace. Warcraft 3 maps to make. So guess what I’m going to do?

That’s right! I’m going to work on my Computer Organization project! Sigh...

Posted at noon on April 23, 2003

Things I Missed

I got a couple of random (not requested) extensions for projects, which gave me more time to procrastinate. A few interesting things have popped up in the last month or so that I caught up on recently.

Mark Pilgrim redesigned his site. He is also learning and teaching about XHTML 2.0. He comments on the <object> tag (Zeldman also shared his thoughts) and has written two articles on transitioning to XHTML 2.0: “The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types” and “All That We Can Leave Behind.” I have yet to read the latter.

The WThRemix contest is over, and the winners have been announced. Notice that all of the honorable mentions failed to set their page’s background colors to the assumed white, causing their designs to look poor to those people (like myself) who don’t use white for their default background color. (I use a light green to reduce contrast.) If your design relies on images matching up with a white background, please take the extra time to put background:white; in your CSS.

Finally, Zeldman mentioned an interesting Wired article about Computer Graphics in The Matrix Reloaded. It frustrates me that it doesn’t go into any detail about the cool algorithms that are mentioned.

That’s all for now, keep checking back.

Posted at 6 PM on April 17, 2003

Obligatory Update

I feel guilty for not updating very much recently, but I’ve just been so busy doing school work (three projects due next week), and in the spare time I have I’ve been playing Warcraft 3. As a result, I don’t have anything web-related to show off or talk about.

For those interested, my submissions to the Warcraft 3 Map Contest (which completed on Friday) are available for download:

I’ll post again as soon as I have something that might hold your interest for a short time. School should be over soon, and come Summer I should have some time to do cool stuff. Hang in there.

Posted at midnight on April 13, 2003

Silly Little Trick

Select it. Internet Explorer for Windows only...

Posted at midnight on April 9, 2003

A Tutorial and the Creation Process

I recently created this ramp tutorial for the Warcraft 3 World Editor. Don’t bother reading it if you don’t create Warcraft 3 maps. The map contest deadline is approaching fast, and I’m trying to get my maps finished while still getting all my schoolwork done.

I’ve created a very nice XML format for these articles (so far only the DOM article and the ramp tutorial) which makes my job a lot easier. The XML format mimics XHTML 2.0, which is really quite a lot better than 1.0 (<section> and <h> make a lot more sense than <h1> through <h6> with <div>s). I use XSLT to transform it into an XHTML 1.0 page with all of the extra stuff (the head of the page, a table of contents, etc.) that all of my web pages have. XSLT is great. Eventually, I will probably convert things like the JavaScript Raytracer documentation into the same XML format, and before long I’ll be able to change every page on my entire website just by modifying an XSLT file or two, running some batch files, and uploading.

I got into that computer graphics class. Unfortunately, that means I had do drop one of the easier social science classes and now I’ll be taking a more difficult one. Win some, lose some.

Back to beta testing!

Posted at 10 PM on April 2, 2003