Another One Of Those Days
July 17th, 2008 by ComputerBob
This is truly unbelievable.
It seems like every time I think I’m “out of the woods” and I’m finally getting close to finishing the entire conversion of this site’s Journal to use WordPress, I run into another roadblock.
As much time as I’ve spent — I’m sure it’s been hundreds and hundreds of hours over the years — trying to use Cascading Style Sheets for both the structure and the style of my web sites, and as much as I’ve learned through painful experience, I still haven’t been able to master it.
CSS is still a big pain in the old behind.
Today, I finished creating my fixed-width template for this web site’s home page, including a fixed-width header and footer. I was very proud of how well they worked and how good they looked.
And I was also pretty relieved. After so many days of frustrating and discouraging problems, it was nice to finally feel like I knew what I was doing again.
So, with a new confidence, I started to apply what I had learned from that task to a create a new template for the rest of this site’s non-WordPress pages.
Bam! Like someone had smashed me in the head, I was suddenly faced with a test page whose layout was wrong and whose typography had very little of the CSS formatting that I had so meticulously crafted for it about 5 years ago.
So here I am, back in CSS hell. Trying to figure it all out again by using the Web Developer Firefox extension to try to determine which attributes in which stylesheets are to blame for this current mess.
I know all the arguments about why Cascading Style Sheets are better, more efficient, blah, blah, blah. I taught them to my students for years.
But it’s been my experience that the promise of CSS and the reality of CSS are two different things. So when the rubber hits the road, if you don’t use it and stay current with its ramifications for different browsers every day, CSS is like a long corridor, full of twisty, turning passages that all look the same, leading to other long corridors, full of twisty, turning passages that all look the same. Those of you who played computerized text-based adventure games in the 70s and 80s know what I’m talking about.
Times like right now are when it gets really difficult. Do I continue working, knowing that I’m so exhausted that I may not be able to figure anything out tonight? Or do I stop for the day, knowing that I might forget what I’m thinking about right now, and might have to think it all through from ground zero all over again tomorrow, just to get back to the level of understanding that I have right now?
Should I just decide right now, or should I take a break and think about it?
Maybe I’ll flip a coin.
Or take Mini and Max for another walk.
They’ve been getting a lot of walks lately.
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