View Source!?
From the “I would if I could” department.
My lastest apt-get update/apt-get update dance included an update to Firefox. One of the sweetest things about Debian (and its derivatives, I'm sure) is how painless it is to keep your system up-to-date. The update/upgrade dance just works.
So I was somewhat surprised by what happened this morning. I was reading Pushing String and thinking, not for the first time, that my site's design is pretty un-inspired. Eve's got all these rounded corners and mouse-over effects and stuff and yet it's all still clean and readable. (Designs that trade style for substance get no cred with me.) And I wondered, just how hard would it be to tweak the CSS on my site to do stuff like that?
“Use the source, Luke!” So I click my way to “View Page Source” and what do I get?
That I couldn't view the source because of an XML error in a XUL file that I'd probably need to view the source of in order to fix just struck me as amusing.
Turns out, all I had to do was quit Firefox and restart it. Upgrading running applications is asking for trouble sometimes, I suppose. But even that usually just works.
The time I could have spent viewing the source, however, I've now spent writing this. So no new design today.
Comments
The rounded corners are a Mozilla extension to CSS. I have say I wasn't expecting it to be quite that simple.
The Mozilla extension for rounded corners is really an implementation of CSS3’s rounded corners, which is nice for when the specs are fully accepted as Recommendations.
Cool. Even better!
But for the time being, it's Mozilla-proprietary stuff, albeit properly marked as such. So in order to keep my CSS valid I added a short Javascript doodle to my site that programmatically sets the rules. Check it out if you want to.
Just catching up on a ton of blog-reading, and saw this. Over on xmlgrrl.com I'm using WordPress, which has a ton of great already-cooked styles available. WordPress has an excellent commitment to separating content and presentation.
In case folks are interested in the, uh, source for the CSS styles I used for my site, check out Alex King's WP styles page:
I used Silver Is the New Black, and tweaked it ever so slightly. If you look at my home page at the upper level, you'll see that I just copied over this template in unofficial fashion. For some reason, the rounded corners don't work on the left side there, only the right side; I haven't bothered to look into why, since that page is just an informal jumping-off point.