hermiene.net

EDINE

— Thief: The Dark Project, Down In The Bonehoard

October 2004

Added a little piece of anti-IE CSS to all my .css files. And the funny thing is that IE users won't even notice. ^_^

My parkour skills continue to evolve. A lot of people stare at us when we're jumping around like crazy (I don't blame them). Some even stop and watch for a while. At first I found this a little uncomfortable, but now I don't mind. Parkour is a really nice way to get in shape.

It's probably premature, but I just want to release my HTML Tutorial. There are some topics I still want to talk about (such as validation), and even an entire collection of elements (phrase elements) I haven't even mentioned, but releasing the tutorial now might give me some incentive to, you know, actually finish it.

Web sites that fail to use <label>s for their <input>s annoy me to no end. It's not that hard! I'm baffled at the incompetency of today's "web designers" ("web fools" is more like it). It's really simple, see:

<input name="color" type="radio" value="red" id="red"> <label for="red">Red</label>

Simple, no? The for attribute's value should be exactly the same as the <input>'s id attribute. Didn't you pay attention in school? That's right, you use FrontPage or some equally rubbish crap. (Which reminds me: I'm still not looking forward to the time when we're going to be using FrontPage in our IT class.)

Although it hasn't been evident on the site, I've begun getting an interest for parkour. It's a relatively new urban "sport" (I like to call it an art). It was "invented" by David Belle in France, quickly spread to England, and is just now establishing itself in Norway. The premise is that you should overcome urban obstacles (fences, stairs, roof-tops, whatever) with flow and fluidity. In fact, just before I heard about the existence of the sport, a similar idea had already lingered in my mind for some time. I've always been a fan of Jackie Chan's movies; I adore the way he (unlike many other Kung Fu artists) uses his surroundings to fight/evade his foes, so perhaps parkour is just an extension of that. I might, when I get better, make a dedicated page to parkour on my site, but for now, check out Urban Freeflow for information and neat images and movies of what parkour is all about.

I added the Settings page. You can use this to tweak stuff on my site. Currently there's only the style switcher (moved from the Colophon page) and a new feature that lets you add or remove the Jump to bar. The Settings page is now deceased. The powers of PHP be praised!

Here's a pretty nifty thing. I recommend the Shockwave version; switching pages is slooow, and the .avi file is jerky.

Mike gave me the idea of using a "this page is printer-friendly" link in the footer. Thanks, Mike!

My pages now feature randomly generated quotes. (The quotes are real enough, it's the order they appear in that's random.) Refresh this page or go to another one, and it should feature a different quote. I currently have 42 quotes, and adding new ones is a breeze. I also slightly reorganized the internal structure of the site. Nothing visible, but it'll make life easier for me.

My father bought a new stereo, so I'm getting to use the old (but still better than my headphones) one. Whooo!

I'm currently working on something... pretty big. I don't want to tell what it is yet, nor do I want to release any links (because as we all know, I'm known everywhere to be dark and mysterious), but I can tell you that some of the nifty stuff I've discovered about PHP/CSS in the process may very well end up being incorporated into the site. And on a related note, I seriously, seriously want to overhaul the site's infrastructure to make my Archived News more manageable (among other things).

The second Wilburer, after some pushing in the right direction, has been found.

I've moved the style sheet changer to the Colophon's styles section instead of having it at the top of every single page (content is more important than style).

A pretty interesting pseudo-class has been discussed on and off on www-style. Although I haven't found a need for it myself (not that that's relevant), people apparently want a parent selector. Several proposals have been made:

  • Modify the subject of the selector chain with :subject: .section ul:subject > li { ... }
  • Modify the subject of the selector chain with parentheses: .section (ul) > li { ... }
  • Modify the subject of the selector chain with the dollar sign: .section $ul > li { ... }
  • The :matches() pseudo-class.

The first proposal is fundamentally flawed; :subject isn't a pseudo-class in any sense, it's a modifier. Also, the first three proposals all suffer from the same thing: they break what's been consistent since CSS1; the last part of the selector chain is what's being selected. So far, my favorite is :matches(). With this, you can use look-ahead assertions to determine whether or not to select the element. Say you want to select <ul>s that are descendants of any element with the class attribute set to section, and you want to require that the <ul>s have <li> children (like in the first three examples). This is done like this: .section ul:matches(# > li) { ... }. Here, the # is referring to the element that's trying to be matched (the <ul>). What's more, :matches() takes an arbitrary amount of comma-separated selectors to try to match, of which at least one has to actually match for the element to be selected: .section ul:matches(# > li.note, # > li.important, # dl.compact) { ... }. And if that wasn't enough, :matches() can be nested arbitrarily. You know what, I can't think of an example where one would use nested :matches()s, but the ability is there. :-P

On another note, the first Wilburer has arrived.

"Every facet, every department of your mind is to be programmed by you, and unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you."

There are 9 posts for October 2004.