Argh. CSS is defeating…

Argh. CSS is defeating me. I think I figured out how to define a style (.floatright), but I thought that telling it that the right margin=10 (or 30, as I'm currently trying) would push the photo of me away from the right edge of the page. But while it looks fine in Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG view, it does not appear to do anything of the sort in the browser. [head banging against desk]

Also, when trying to get the column color to flow to the bottom of the page, I thought adding height: 100%; to the left nav bar would do it, especially after I found this page saying I needed to add that code to the body too. I was so excited. But after implementing, no dice. No effect, as far as I can see.

3 p.m. update. Okay, an hour and a half later, I think I know a way that'll work for a center column, but I don't think it will for a float left column. And the other solution people suggest seems to be tiling a background image vertically, which I guess I'll try if no one can suggest something better. Which means making a background image? Oof. In any case, I'm going to stop for today, I think, and go back to the reading and syllabus prep. (I've finished the excellent Asian American Dreams history text, and am moving on to another theory book...I need a break from coding. Something nice and simple, like post-colonial crit, where one thing generally does follow logically from the another...

4:15 update. Jed figured out how I broke the live feed, and fixed the .floatright. Yay, Jed!

I'm planning on a nice little graphic under the top nav bar, btw, if you're wondering what that space is for. Some kind of mehndi pattern, repeating in the same green as the left nav bar. I bought a book/CD of Indian royalty-free patterns, which will arrive on Wednesday; I'm looking forward to that. I imagine I'll be wanting such patterns for flyer/poster/etc. design in the future, which helped justify buying it. Although it was pretty cheap, too. Yay, Dover Publishing.

2 thoughts on “Argh. CSS is defeating…”

  1. Sent email to M about this, but in case any readers are wondering:

    Fixed the float-right issue.

    Making column color extend down the page appears to be a tricky proposition. See Equal Height Columns and Faux Columns, among others. This is one of those areas where something that’s a simple and obvious and common design/layout choice turns into a nightmare when you try to implement it in CSS; although CSS is wonderful in many ways, in its current incarnation the designers didn’t give nearly enough thought to being able to do perfectly ordinary page-layout things that most word processors can do easily.

  2. Oh — just saw your update. The main problem with Dover’s clip-art books, or at least the ones I’ve looked at, is that the electronic copies of the art, on the CD, are fairly low-resolution. (On the order of 72dpi, iIrc.) That’s fine for web pages, but not so good for material you want to print on paper. 🙁

    But it’s possible that more recent Dover clip-art books have higher-resolution images, dunno.

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