Firstly, thanks for your reply, Holly -- and also thanks to Jen, too,
for the tip (in a separate message) on the book to look for
At 11:59 AM 1/19/2009 -0600, Holly Bergevin wrote:
As with most things CSS, you'll need to test the effect you want in
the environment it's going to be placed. Oh, and in a variety of
browsers as well to see if the results are acceptable to you.
Actually, I had already done that before I even posted my question,
tested out different variations of the drop cap style that I'd gotten
from the wiki site for this list, and also ran my page through
Browsershots and tried it out in 40+ browsers -- it seemed to work
okay for the most part, except for a couple of browsers where things
went a little bit haywire (I forget which browsers, but I think they
were "less popular" ones, so if things go funny for, like, 0.01% of
my visitors, well, that's too bad, but I suppose I could live with that).
it is doubtful that the author would suggest padding in ex units at this time
I seem to recall a fairly recent thread here on that subject -- in
fact, I saved a bunch of font-related posts, so I should go through
them (again) and see what they had to say about that (again).
On a similar note, for all these many years (ever since I first
implemented CSS on my sites) I've had my base font size set at 14px,
because that was -- apparently -- what tons of research said was the
best way to go, at least at *that* time (years ago). From the
aforementioned recent thread it would seem not to be the way to go,
though, and so now I've been re-thinking how to do up the font sizing
on my site. Argh.
That's a discussion for a separate thread, though, of course (if
there's anything further to discuss, that is).
Another page that may give you an example is -
http://www.gunlaug.no/contents/wd_additions_04.html
Nicely laid out page, Georg (assuming you're reading this)! As an old
"table layout" guy (for the time being, at least), when I look at the
source code for pages like yours, though, I find that I'm just
utterly mystified, it's hard for me to make head or tail of how you
did certain things -- but that'll all come in time, I suppose. :/
The nature of web pages and browsers is not static like print, and
there are a variety of variables that can come into play on any
given page. If you don't like the look of the padding, take it out,
or adjust it until you do like it. That's one of the beautiful parts of CSS....
That may be what's beautiful about it, but it's also what worries me
about it -- that is, whether what I create today (which might seem to
work well enough cross-browser/platform) will still work tomorrow,
whenever some new browser version (or new browser!) comes out.
Good luck, Ron, and keep experimenting.
I think that's part of it, too -- I don't want to spend all my time
"experimenting", I really just want to get things "published", over
and done with. I wish one didn't have to experiment and test
practically everything -- I wish things were developed enough already
that there was just simply tried-and-true ways to do certain things,
so that one could just do them and not have to worry about them,
whether they look/work okay (and will continue to do so for the long haul).
Maybe, at middle-age (but sometimes feeling more like a senior!), I'm
just getting too old for this. Ah, if only I could have what I know
now, but could be a teenager once again...
Ron :/
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