Another design tweak

As you might have noticed, I’ve been a bit pre-occupied recently. And likely will be so in the future. So a design for this site has once again been placed on the back burner. I am good for a tweak-ing, however.

Looks fine in Firefox 2 for mac/pc. Opera, has a small problem, I think due to a varied em interpretation (it’s different on each platform). I tried IE6, and of course, things were missing, but the design as a whole stood up. So a few “non-lazy” changes should do the trick. Having only spent 30 minutes and using :before and :after pseudo attributes, I was surprised IE didn’t send my PC up in flames.

It just occurs to me, it would be nice if I could add a little javascript (for fun, not practical usage). Not sure what I would add it to, however. Oh well, placed on my to-do list after the real design.

Firefox for Mac and displaying small font sizes

So I had a problem a while back where I thought Firefox for Mac was picking up some left-over or un-overridden size styles, while the other browsers were not. It turns out that it wasn’t actually my problem.

While all of the other browsers that I tested… for both Windows and Mac display the default font (serif) set to .8em as glyphs that are 9 pixels tall, Firefox for Mac displays glyphs that are 8 pixels tall, but with 1 pixel of anti-aliasing on top. The difference of one pixel usually doesn’t mean much, but when dealing with font-sizes that small, it makes a big visual difference.

I submitted a Mozilla bug report which has not yet been picked up, but I’m not sure if there’s anything to be done, especially if the rendering engine is at all based on the system software (doubtful, since none of the other browsers work the same way). I wonder if the release of MacOSX Leopard is going to affect this.

Gotta love the Mozilla people, though. It’s such a relief that you can even submit a bug report for something like this. A chance for actual interaction, and a chance to better the product. I only wish Microsoft would pay a little attention.

Opera 9 and decimal em lengths

I love ems. I set values (using hundredths) like 2.15em regularly. It would seem, however, that Opera 9 either calculates this value differently or rounds up the calculated value. I’ve done a bit of testing today, and adjusted a number of heights which weren’t visually aligned to other things. I used the @media and ~ hack to set a smaller length for Opera 9. I’ll have to investigate this further.