[CLUE-Tech] Using CSS to get an HTML table effect.

[Jed S. Baer]

On 29 Oct 2003 09:57:47 -0600
"Michael J. Hammel" <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org> wrote:

> I removed all tables from my wife's web site (www.bluebugstudio.com) and
> replaced them with CSS.  There are still some cross browser issues but
> most can be handled with CSS - there is no Javascript in there to check
> for browsers.

I agree it's an attractive site. You might want to know that your navbar
links exhibit a lot of "hover jitter" in Galeon -- on my machine, at
least. What I mean by that is that as I mouse over links, the content flow
gets re-rendered, with elements moving around, in response to the hover
element changing it's display box size. Usually, when I see this, it's
because somebody has made their links go bold on hover.

I see your CSS has:

  #navbar a {
	display: block;
	font: normal

  #navbar a:hover {
	color: #ffffff;
	background-color: #7888ff;
	font: italic

so I guess it takes a little more screen space to display italic text as
well, and that's what causing things to move around.

> I learned to do this using Eric Meyer's text "Eric Meyer on CSS".  It
> has a set of projects, each with its own chapter, that shows how to do
> some very clever stuff with CSS.  The first chapter shows how to get rid
> of tables.  He discusses some tricks you can play with CSS to deal with
> poorly behaved browsers (like IE).
> 
> To see what you can do with CSS online, check out these two sites:
> http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/  - ne of Eric Meyer's site,
> though not the companion site for the text
> http://www.csszengarden.com/  - the best site I've ever seen for showing
> what is possible with todays browsers and really good CSS code.  This
> one is a trip.  They take the exact same content and display it a
> thousand different ways, all by modifying *ONLY* the css stylesheets. 
> Very cool stuff.

I encountered csszengarden a while back. Yeah, that's a cool site. I'll
have a look at Eric Meyer's stuff too -- thanks.

jed
-- 
... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier