MaW’s Blog

Thankyou to the people who’ve sent me screenshots, I think I’ve got all the major browsers covered now (I didn’t get one from Netscape 4, but that’s okay, I know it’ll look awful). The results are:

Internet Explorer 6 renders the layout correctly, but fails to correctly position the background images. This is either due to not supporting the background-position CSS attribute, or interpreting it relative to the context element instead of the viewport. So it looks acceptable, but isn’t right.
Opera 7 renders it almost perfectly, just a slight glitch with the border around the element
All versions of Mozilla I have seen screenshots from have rendered it correctly

So it’s viewable by most people, but you don’t get the full effect unless you have Opera 7 (possibly earlier versions as well, but I’ve not seen anything from those) or Mozilla or Konqeror 3.1. It’s also possible Safari might work, but I don’t know how up-to-date the CSS support in their version of KHTML is, and I don’t know anyone running Mac OS X at the moment to test it.

On another note, all these screenshots really made me notice what a difference the font rendering of an OS can make to how a web page looks… I’m so used to the antialiased experience of Xft2 under Linux and the inferior ClearType under Windows (note, that comparison is highly subjective) that it’s almost a shock to see non-AAed screenshots on my monitor.

As a reward for everyone, here’s a shot of what it looks like on my system. That’s Galeon from CVS, using Mozilla 1.3b with GTK+ 2 support, GTK+ 2.2.1 on XFree86 4.3.0 on a Gentoo Linux box. JPEG compression mucks it up a bit, but you should get the idea.

You really wanted to know that, didn’t you.

Okay, I’m curious… with all this CSS2 stuff I’m using in the new design, how terribly does this thing render in browsers other than Mozilla 1.3? I know there are a couple of tiny glitches with Gecko, but otherwise that’s what it’s designed for so it works fine. Konqueror 3.1 also handles it fine, I’ve tested it. What about everything else? Anyone who feels like they have the time can send me a screenshot of the front page rendered with whatever browser they happen to be using, the more exotic or archaic the better.

There won’t be a prize for the winner, sorry. I’m a student after all.

My parents bought me an enormous Toblerone - not necessarily the largest Toblerone you get get, I’ve seen some pretty huuuuuge ones from time to time, but probably the largest ‘normal’ size that’s commonly available in the United Kingdom. So I’m in the process of eating it, and I thought I’d mention something about the realisation I recently had about just how perfect the Toblerone really is as an item of confectionary.

I mean, think about it. It’s got lots and lots of smooth milk chocolate, which is speckled with delicious pieces of honey-imbued almond, slightly soft and sticky and absolutely delicious - unless of course you don’t like nuts, honey or almonds.

And even better, this whole delightful package is shaped into a triangular prism-like shape, which is formed from multiple triangular segments just perfect for breaking off and enjoying individually. Gorgeous! Perfection in an oddly-shaped cardboard box.

Excuse me, writing that has made me want to indulge in another piece of Toblerone. Please excuse me.

Changed some more things, not finished yet…

As you can see, I’ve been playing with the visuals again, but I think I somehow managed to partially break the right-hand column, it’s behaving very strangely when there’s a small amount of content in the left-hand one. I guess that means I’m going to have to make lots of big long entries until I work out how to fix it.

In other news, I pressed ‘Forget Passwords’ again in Evolution. They really, really, really need to move that - but then that whole menu’s too big anyway. Hopefully after 1.4.0 comes out the door they’ll work on fixing the UI.