So, new design. Yes? No? Have you worked with style sheets? Love 'em? Hate 'em?

Anyone used style sheets with GoLive CyberStudio? What's up with par-div-whatever?

Aaargh.

-- Sara Astruc (saraastruc@aol.com), June 26, 2000

Answers

I'm a CSS evangelist (can I get an amen, somebody?!) and would be happy to help you out however I can.

Netscape - and to a lesser extent, some versions on some platforms of IE - have difficulty cascading styles to tags that are within tables. Nest a table and you're going to have to switch to inline styles for any tags therein.

What fun, eh?

Please let me know if and how I can help out.

-- gabby (gabby@enteract.com), June 26, 2000.

Gabby- I'll probably take you up on that. Like maybe you can tell me why, in the nav menu at the bottom of "This is a Test, II," the "New Answers" link appears in black, while everything else is the proper color?

Out of the 14 screen shots I received this morning, not one was from a WIndows user. And while I love me some Mac folk, I need Windows screen shots. Anyone? Anyone?

People also seemed to like the turquoise design much better than this one. I'm not married to this, but I do prefer less color to more. Hmm.... I'm wavering now.

This is why I can't buy a couch.

-- Sara Astruc (saraastruc@aol.com), June 26, 2000.

Okay.

You need to think strategically about your style sheets. I find that it's much easier to define styles for tags straight out and then go back and create classes to take care of variations.

Your links are freaky because you've only set one pseudo-class - a:hover. You'll need to define styles for a:link and a:visited if you want the colors to work right.

I'm going to take this sample page and do some fixing and I'll email it to you, just as an example.

-- gabby (gabby@enteract.com), June 26, 2000.

Gabby, you're a goddess. I'm going out today to buy a book. I have two manuals for CyberStudio, but I really need something specific to Style Sheets, as these books I have strike me as being outdated.

I've been getting more screen shoots. No big surprises. The page looks pretty awful in Netscape. The centering at the bottom is all screwed up but I think I know how to fix that. Even with the alignment being messed up in Netscape, I think I can live with that. I'm trying to be more forward-thinking in my design.

I used to be a Netscape evangelist, my brother worked on Mozilla, but I just can't do it anymore. They fell too far behind in the browser wars.

-- Sara Astruc (saraastruc@aol.com), June 26, 2000.

Sara -

I sent you two WinNT screenshots this morning, so hopefully they'll get there soon. I haven't gotten around to reinstalling Netscape after a reformat, but when I do I'll get you shots of that, too.

As far as stylesheets go, I love love love them. But I don't embed mine in my pages, I include the link to them in the header but keep them as separate .css files. That way if I need to change one, it will affect all of my pages without having to edit several hundred of them individually. BTW, the design is great.

Good luck...if you need more shots, holler. I have access to many an OS. =)

- Rae

-- Rae Stuart (rae@diva.org), June 26, 2000.

Sara -

I can't make the same claims to goddesshood w/r/t stylesheets, but I did spend an awful lot of time at the old day job writing stylesheets that worked well across all sorts of browsers. So if you want to email me source code, I'd be happy to tweak it and explain what I did.

In the meantime, here are some good stylesheet sites on the Web:

http://webreview.com/wr/pub/guides/style/mastergrid.html - will show you what stylesheet attributes work with which browsers.

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/stylesheets/reference/ - a basic reference section for learning about stylesheets, also includes documentation on what works with what browsers.

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/css/test/results - excruciatingly specific results of CSS tests on assorted page elements.

http://style.verso.com/ - an excellent resource for understanding the conceptual framework behind stylesheets, and for making design-based stylesheet decisions.

I hope these links help; remember that you can email me with code as well.

-- Lisa Schmeiser (lisa-nospam@schmeiser.com), June 26, 2000.

Sara, is it total and utter blasphemy to admit that I actually 'like' the salmon color of the pink column? :) Or do I now have to go into hiding like Salman Rushdie?

~M~

-- Meg Stone (Meg_1837@yahoo.com), June 27, 2000.

I like the salmon too, but "salmon column" just doesn't have the ring of "pretty pink column!" Or maybe it's just time to give pink column a vacation...

-- Sara Astruc (saraastruc@aol.com), June 27, 2000.

I like the new title and everything, but if you're going to use that very nice purple thing for when the mouse crosses over the text (you can see I'm getting technical), you may want to rethink the reds and blacks you use elsewhere. It would go better with the sparkly blue Perfect Way design like you have on Astruc.com right now. In my very humble opinion, I like the lighter colors you use. Maybe you should make the colors seasonal or something :).

I'd like to encourage use of a larger font - I miss your nice old Verdana. In fact every time I use Verdana I think of your site, so it's quite an absence. It fits the clean lines and no-frills look of the page. Good luck!

-- Lauren (floweroffire@hotmail.com), June 27, 2000.

I'm glad it's working out better, Sara. One small thing: in order for style sheets to work on a tag like

, it MUST have a closing tag -

. That might be part of the problem. I tried to close all the tags I saw. Oh - do send me a mailing address, my CD burner arrived yesterday so I can send you a copy of [censored] that we talked about in the email. The best book out on the market is Cascading Style Sheets: the Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer. It includes comprehensive charts of what works in which browsers on what platforms. O'Reilly books are the bomb. In the meantime, a visit to http://css.nu should help.

-- gabby (gabby@enteract.com), June 27, 2000.

What I want to know is: what happens if I "forget this site is moving on July 25 to astruc.com?"

-- Dave Van (davevan01@hotmail.com), July 24, 2000.

Well, probably nothing.

But I'm not sure that fauve.cc will be pointing to astruc.com in time, so you may be left alone, scratching your head, wondering where all the pretty ladies went.

-- Sara Astruc (saraastruc@aol.com), July 24, 2000.

This forum is closed! Visit ThreeWay Action to post!

-- Sara Astruc (astruc@astruc.com), September 10, 2000.