Saturday, September 13, 2008

Table formatting issue resolved

Yesterday saw me find the source of the issue in table formatting, and it is now fixed. It only took half an hour or so of google searches to find the answer, test it out, and get it running properly. The problem is a subtle one.

Something about DOCTYPE certain statements causes tables to decide that images are to be printed in text rather than block context. Fixes are being discussed by the HTML and style definition folks, but that's long term. For now, there's a way to override the issue, and since what I am doing is pretty limited in scope, it worked.

What am I doing? Reworking the navigation headers on my website, again. I know, I just finished installing them the other day (mostly - the gallery is automatically generated and I haven't had the time to fix that yet) but once I did it all I found they blended in with the rest of the page too well. They needed to be bit distinctive so that visitors know what they are and could concentrate on the rest of the page.

To accomplish that they needed to use a different background color, and that lead to putting them into a table, and that lead to finding the bug, and so on.

I'm slowly updating all the pages to use the new navigation header format now. It will take several days to get it all done, but the most forward and visited pages are now updated, so things are getting better.

I'm always interested in feedback on my website, so feel free to contact me about it.