Rui CarmoI'm still redesigning my photo album and, like a lot of people before me, I'm trying to use CSS positioning at a pixel level (i.e., trying to actually place things within mere pixels of each other).
Besides the differences in JavaScript (which I use only sparingly, since I abhore the technology itself), the result so far is a page that will only render correctly on Mozilla, Applications/Safari, Camino and other W3C-compliant browsers, because Internet Explorer (even 6.0) uses a "box model" that does not perform basic arithmetic correctly - that is, it believes borders and such are part of the div content area, mucking up layouts with solid borders, padding, and clip rectangles (Mozilla is an example of utter stupidity when using overflow: hidden, but at least it positions and sizes items properly).
The whole box model thing is extensively described (and worked around) in the css-discuss Wiki, but I can't bring myself to actually use those sort of hacks. That's for the simple reason that someday yet another browser (most likely IE 7.0) will come around and break everything else again, and I don't like to code for exceptions.
This is not Coding For The Ages, it's a mess. I sympathize with the entire web design community when they say cross-browser compatibility is far from being an attainable goal (at least those who have the brains to acknowledge IE has a layout bug the size of a long-haul truck).
And now, I'm off to apply my own layout hack: the dreaded 1-pixel invisible GIF.
NeXT e-Zine
Via macslash, I found that a group of NeXT enthusiasts started an e-zine. More than a blast from the past for the few of us ever to actually use the machines, it actually has some useful info, such as pointers to running OpenStep on VMware.
Why would I want to do that, you ask? Because, like Mac OS X, it just worked - and besides trouncing any modern Linux distro on usability terms, it included a number of useful applications and tools out of the box.
Oh well.