February, 2002:

After a very long trial period, it doesn’t look like I am going to be able to keep the cat that someone left on Kari‘s doorstep ages ago. The cat known as Umlaut Chino Tagert New-Kitty Bitch-Cat Bastard, and, more recently, Adolf.

He is a very cute, very sweet, very playful, people friendly cat. He sleeps by my side every night, and greets me at the door every day when I come home. He is fixed, box trained, is very good about not getting on counters or tables, and knows to keep his nose out of your plate when eating. He doesn’t tear up the house, doesn’t get into things he shouldn’t, and is for all purposes a very good cat. Were he my only cat, I would most assuredly not be making this post.

The problem is this. He doesn’t get along with other animals. Let me rephrase that, he hates other animals. I have tried everything to get him and Toby to get along. I sit with them both, making them sit close by in order to get scratches. I feed them near eachother. I encourage them to sleep together. I brush them with the same brush. I even tried wetting a towel and rubbing each of them down with it in order to mix their scents. Nothing seems to work. When Maiko still lived here, he didn’t get along with her either.

Both of the cats began to hide from him. They wouldn’t come out when he was nearby, and, on the rare occasion that they did, they would stay huddled in the corner. They wouldn’t eat, except when I was supervising. There were times when I would wake up in the middle of the night to find Toby cornered in the bathroom trying to use the litter box, and unable to do so because Umlaut wouldn’t let him leave.

The deciding factor occurred this evening. I brought Toby out from under my bed against his better judgement. I had him in my lap and was petting him for quite some time. He eventually relaxed, and laid down. Umlaut came by to see what was going on. He wouldn’t take his eye off of Toby. I was petting them both, and everything was fine except that, on occasion, I would have to awve my hand in front of Umlaut’s eyes to get him to step the constant eye contact he was making with Toby. Eventually, Toby got down, and Umlaut immediately went to attack him. I held Umlaut down and petted him, trying to calm him down. When it seemed to be working, I loosened my grip, and Umlaut jumped off the couch. He tore after Toby, cornering him in the dining room. The rolled, and hisses, and clawed and fought. Toby ran away and Umlaut followed. I eventually broke up the all out cat fight occurring in my apartment. Toby ran and hid under my bed, and Umlaut walked away, clumps of Toby’s hair, and spot of blood littering the carpet. Umlaut was choking on a giant wad of Toby’s fur.

They aren’t playing. They are fighting. And it has been going on since I got him, just after Christmas. I have tried being nice, I have tried the squirt bottle, I have tried yelling, and I have tried physical discipline. Nothing seems to work.

I think it may have to do with the fact that Toby and Maiko are very shy cats in general, and are not willing to stand their ground, which leads Umlaut to overpower them every time. When Beanie was here, he and Umlaut fought at first. Eventually, however, they were able to sleep in the same bed without incident a lot of the time. Granted, Beanie is a dog, and the other two are cats, which probably has something to do with it, but I think the fact that Beanie stood up for himself had a lot to do with it as well.

Umlaut is locked in Jaclyn’s old room for the night. Toby is terrorized with him in the apartment. He isn’t sleeping, isn’t eating, and has scars all over his body.

Umlaut really is a great cat, as long as he doesn’t have any other animals to contend with.

If anyone is looking for, or knows someone who is looking for, a very good, very well trained, very friendly cat, and doesn’t have any other pets that freely roam about the house, please contact me via email. I am going to be sad to see him go, but I don’t think I have any other choice. Leaving him locked in a bedroom all the time is not a good situation, and neither is the constant cat fights, and the terror he instills in Toby. Even if you can’t take him, and wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes to help me out, please get the word out, either by telling your friends, or even a post of your own linking to this entry.

I wouldn’t lie to you. He really is an incredibly good cat, if only I didn’t have any other animals.

I’ll post pictures sometime over the next couple of days.

I am a happy man. Using CSS (and ONE little table for the header because the “float” property either don’t work properly in my browser or doesn’t do what I think it does) and nested DIVs I have successfully completed my new layout. It still needs finishing touches (nav bars, link colors, graphics for entries, comments, and days, correct menu items, etc) but the layout basics are there. If your browser renders this correctly, it will render any future changes I might make correctly as well.

It should look decent in ALL browsers (although text based browsers and Netscape 4.x will suffer a severe lack of “prettiness”). Additionally, it should conform to almost any browser width (if you get REAL small, the menu jumps to the bottom, which can’t be avoided… if your browser can’t fit 100 characters worth of space across the screen, you’re in trouble anyway) and any font size. It employs PNGs which might mean that some versions of IE will render the graphics incorrectly, but I don’t really care. It’s your browsers fault, not mine. (Actually, I may end up converting them to the GIF format, just to be nice).

Testers, rev your screenshot programs and let me know how this looks.

problems with CSS layout. CSS is immature. Sure, it is in it’s second version and going on the third, but the browser support has only really been there for ONE version. Since a conforming browser was not built along side the development of CSS, there are some aspects that were overlooked, and other aspects that just aren’t supported in browsers yet. Marko Karppinenmart> makes an interesting point about CSS layout in a comment to my post about the problems with CSS layout. CSS is immature. Sure, it is in it’s second version and going on the third, but the browser support has only really been there for ONE version. Since a conforming browser was not built along side the development of CSS, there are some aspects that were overlooked, and other aspects that just aren’t supported in browsers yet. Marko Karppinen makes an interesting observation stating:

Perhaps it is because my mind is still trapped in the world of tables, but, regardless of what I do, I can’t seem to be satisfied with CSS layout.

CSS either needs an excellent tutorial for fluid (not pixel based) layout using the current model, or it needs to implement one of the two major models for layout: tables, packing. While I enjoy the flexibility CSS offers, not being able to place particular portions of a document into a predetermined grid makes layout — layout as we have always known it, at least — impossible.

The table method, employed by pre-CSS browsers was replaced because it mixed content with layout. While I agree that the separation of these entities is a good thing, I still desire interesting looking layout, which requires this level of flexibility. The packing method, employed by various graphical toolkits like GTK and TK, works as well, if not better than, tables for layout. However, this isn’t supported in pre-CSS browsers, and isn’t currently in the CSS spec, so it is doubtful that it will occur.

Absolute positioning in CSS (if it worked in all browsers) is promising, however, still not flexible enough. I need a way to say that a particular element should show up below or above another element without having to nest elements simply for layout purposes (as that defeats the purpose of CSS to begin with). I need to be able to do this positioning without relying on pixels. Even relying on pixels would be okay, if different units of measurement could be added together. An example of this: I have a header running across the top of the page, and I would like to place another element immediately below it. I know the header is “1ex” tall with “2ex” worth of padding and a “2px” border on the bottom. I should be able to position an element at “0 + 3ex + 2px”. However, even being able to do addition of different units can cause problems when text wraps onto the next line and you have no method of knowing that that occurred.

All in all, while the current CSS model can be FORCED to operate correctly, it either requires using markup for layout, decreases available functionality, or doesn’t perform as desired with browser windows of varying size and fonts that are sized by the user.

Even though IE5PC gets the box model WRONG according to the W3C spec, I actually like their way of doing it better. It makes it MUCH easier to add up percentages. With the spec’s version of the box model, if I have two boxes side by side of equal width, I could set them at 50% each and be happy. But… if there is a border, a margin or some padding involved, I have to decrease that 50% value to account for those elements. However, those elements are generally NOT calculated by percentages, because it just doesn’t look right. How do you subtract (2px) + (10% * 2) + (4ex * 2) from 50%? Yeah… exactly… you can’t. So you guess. However… once you start increasing/decreasing the width of your browser, things get a little screwy. You get extra space where you didn’t want it, things become uncentered, and eventually, float elements push other float elements out of the way to make more room. I could make DIV’s on the outside with the correct percentage points (and no margins, padding or border) and place DIVs inside those with the actual content desired and the width set to 100%, but that would involve using markup for layout’s sake which I don’t want to do and is one of the biggest reasons for using CSS to begin with.

Yet another version of the layout is available.

This version works (in some cases acceptably, and in other cases perfectly) in the following browsers:

Mozilla 2002-02-14 Linux (Thanks to me)
Opera 6.0TP2 Linux (Thanks to me)
Mozilla 0.9.4 Win32 (Thanks to me)
IE 5.00.2920.0000 Win32 (Thanks to me)
Mozilla 2002-02-21 Win32 (Thanks to chrisg)
IE 6.0.2600.0000 Win32 (Thanks to chrisg)
Konquerer 2.2.1 Linux (Thanks to belle_mort)
IE 5.50.4807.2300 Win32 (Thanks to joiseyguy)
Opera 6.1 Win32 (Thanks to joiseyguy)
IE 5.50.2022 Mac OS9 (Thanks to weh)
IE 5.00 Win32 (Thanks to amarceluk)

It doesn’t work on the following browsers (obviously):
Netscape 4.78 Linux (Thanks to belle_mort)
Netscape 4.7 Win32 (Thanks to joiseyguy)

I don’t intend on making it work there, but I do intend on making it acceptable.

Thanks again to everyone for your help. If you have a browser version that has not been tested, please take a screenshot and post it in the comments. In the mean time, I am going to assume this design is acceptable in all MODERN browsers, and attempt to fix it up for non-CSS browsers and Netscape 4.

I have another version of the CSS layout available. This one accounts for the non-conforming aspects of IE5PC in respect to widths.

The short end of the problem with IE5PC is that it INCLUDES borders, padding, and margins in the width calculation when the spec says it should not. In other words, if you declare the width of something to be 100px with 10px margins on either side, IE5PC will give you 100px to accommodate the content AND the margins, leaving the content with 80px to use. Conforming browsers do not include margins, borders, and padding in the width calculation. Therefore if you declare the width of something to be 100px with 10px margins on either side, conforming browsers will give you 120px to accommodate the content and the margins, leaving the content with 100px to use, as you requested.

I have tested this layout in Mozilla 0.9.8 (Linux), Mozilla 0.9.4 (Win32), Opera 6TP2 (Linux), and IE5.00 PC. I’d like to hear feedback from persons with the following browsers: IE5 MAC, IE6 PC, Netscape 4, and Konquerer. Of course, information on any other browsers is also appreciated.

Please test it in your browser and let me know of any inconsistencies or problems. The next step is to arrange items and add hidden elements to accommodate non-CSS capable browsers. This will make the layout more accessible on wireless devices, easier for text to speech translators to read and a bit easier to deal with in Netscape 4/IE 4/IE 3.

I have a little bit of money that I can spend. It has been a while since I have purchased any major electronics for myself. The advantage of this particular piece of equipment, is that it will satisfy both the “electronics” side of me and the “art” side of me. It is the Minolta dImage 7. I have found it for about $700. The feature list is amazing.

I would like to spawn a discussion here about the Minolta dImage 7 and its competitors. If you own one, tell me what you like about it, tell me what you dislike about it, and tell me how you use it. What is the picture quality like? How do you handle the Minolta palette and its conversion into the sRGB colorspace? Can you provide a few HIGH QUALITY samples of the images it produces? How rugged is it? Have you ever dropped yours? Have you ever left yours sitting on a park bench in the hot sun for hours at a time? Did it still work afterwards? Have you ever had to upgrade the camera’s firmware? How difficult was the process? What software do you use to get the images off the camera? How well does it work?

If you own something comparable to the Minolta, tell me how it compares. What features does it have this the Minolta does not? What features does the Minolta have that yours does not? What do you like about your camera? What do you dislike about it?

I gave up on using CSS for super fancy designs. I’ve decided that, at this point anyway, anything outside of “basic” will require the use of tables (with CSS) in order to achieve them.

However, I have been able create a simple layout that suits me for the time being. I’ve tested it with Opera 6.0TP3 and Mozilla 0.9.8. If any of you would like to test it in other browsers, I would appreciate it.

Other than font rendering, it should look EXACTLY (well, not exactly as IE5PC doesn’t conform to the CSS spec in regard to widths, so I had to work around that, and the work-arounds are going to be off by a few pixels) like this:

click for larger version

After days of reading, countless hours of coding, and tons of help from fellow LiveJournal users, and other Technically Minded Citizens I have solved all of my CSS problems. What you have to do is this: don’t use CSS for layout. Ever. And you thought CSS was difficult.