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Post by Doan the Nado on Jul 13, 2006 20:58:37 GMT -5
The top of the board now has an all-new look. My hope is that you don't think it takes up too much space. By moving the main banner in with everything else, I hoped to consolidate that top space so as to allow the chat without creating a need to scroll a lot. If you feel that everything is getting pushed too far down the page, I may shorten it up a little bit. Please let me know what you think of the redesign. Is it an improvement? Are there things you would have me change? I know that the borders are kind of non-uniform. The problem is that Internet Explorer and Firefox treat divs (and their properties) slightly different. That was the closest I could get everything to looking good in both browsers. There remains a possibility of changing it back to tables (I know, that's terrible in 2006), because tables are rendered pretty much the same across browsers. Anyways, let me know what you think. Would you be okay with seeing that table on every page? The banner would change to the title of the forum that you are in. Oh yeah, that banner actually links to my website, but the ones on other forums would link back to the specific forum's main page. Here's to small changes (and to things staying the same) in the Domain!
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Post by thetruecoolness on Jul 13, 2006 21:15:43 GMT -5
Well I like the chat much better how it is now. Of course I can't say much about scrolling as I have 1600x1200 screen so I have a lot more real estate to work with than others. And I feel your pain with the div stuff as I have been developing a site for a friends webcomic just using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and everything I do works perfect in Firefox and Opera, and then I open IE and it's all wrong. I wish people would wise up and get a real browser, but people are lazy and uneducated about IE's many shortcomings, and lack of any real standards compliance.
Once I finish with that site I'll link to it to show off some of the cool features it will have, like thumbnail viewer for the comics, and a drop down menu system that can be easily edited by adding a line or two to the HTML, same with adding stuff to the comic viewer.
I don't think it would be a big deal seeing the chat on every page, though on non main pages you might want to shrink it to about half size.
So it's looking pretty good.
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Post by Rodak on Jul 14, 2006 4:32:25 GMT -5
I like it
I don't think I'll use the chat thingy much.
But it looks professional.
Well done.
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Post by Doan the Nado on Jul 14, 2006 4:50:34 GMT -5
Thank you to both of you. I like the idea of having two separate heights based on where you're at one the message boards. I'll have to consider that as I continue tweaking everything.
Speaking of tweaking everything, I changed the way the divs are rendered a little bit, and they now seem to be more uniform cross-browser. There are slight differences, but it seems to be an improvement from how it was before. The problem was that I was still thinking in terms of tables, and when I completely changed my methodology, it just worked better.
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Post by thetruecoolness on Aug 8, 2006 4:00:43 GMT -5
Is there anyway we could have the chat be in a seperate window. It would be a lot easier to deal with that way I think, maybe we could be able to set a cookie for it by clicking on an open in new window button, and then you could check for it. I know it should be impossible for a website to crash a browser, but so far yours is the only site which has done it, and it was only after the chat was added, and it only happens when I click on links on the pages where the chat is.
It would also be nice to have it in a seperate window so you can see what's going on while you're browsing the forums. I also noticed when you have it open in two tabs in Firefox only one updates.
So I think the option to have it open in a new window would be benefitial to everyone, since I know I'm used to a chat being in it's own window.
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Post by NASH7777 on Aug 8, 2006 11:45:51 GMT -5
I option click the chat frame and open it in it's own window. then I can make that window as large as I please. It's convenient other than when I load the home page it still has to load the chat in each time and it still takes up space, an option to put it away would be nice.
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Post by KuroShinnen on Aug 8, 2006 14:06:15 GMT -5
I agree to have the chat in a new window. Besides it gets annoying that my computer crashes a lot because the main page is constantly refreshing because of the chat. I also think it would be nice to have some kind of sound whenever somebody talks, just so people don't always miss a message.
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Post by realitybites on Aug 8, 2006 14:24:10 GMT -5
Hmm, I just tried your thing Nash, and sadly, its a no go in FF or IE, it appears that only works in Safari.
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Post by thetruecoolness on Aug 8, 2006 15:59:23 GMT -5
Well you can open the chat in a new window by right-clicking on it and saying view frame in new window on FF, but you can't reply as that's not part of the frame, and if you try the whole frame you get a message saying that won't work. Still you can only view it in one tab at a time.
So the crashing thing can be fixed, and it does seem to be because of a plugin, but a very useful one. So this shouldn't be too hard to implement, though if you want any help I'm sure I could rig up some Javascript for you.
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Post by Doan the Nado on Aug 8, 2006 16:58:15 GMT -5
Oh, I can certainly do a separate window thing, that won't be a problem at all. The problem is that I haven't had time lately: my house is a mess and I've been spending any time not at work getting my new system set up (which, by the way, I happen to be posting from just now :-). Give me a week or two, and I'll have it all buttoned up nicely, but until then, I'm sorry if anyone is having problems.
Also, I've mentioned it before, but playing a sound wouldn't be possible strictly with HTML (as far as I know). I may be able to look into playing sounds with Javascript, but if it would involve the use of Flash or anything like that, I won't do it.
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Post by Rodak on Sept 9, 2006 4:17:42 GMT -5
I know that the borders are kind of non-uniform. The problem is that Internet Explorer and Firefox treat divs (and their properties) slightly different. That was the closest I could get everything to looking good in both browsers. There remains a possibility of changing it back to tables (I know, that's terrible in 2006), because tables are rendered pretty much the same across browsers. If tables are rendered uniform across browsers, why are they frowned upon? This is what I see in Firefox with "Control +" hit twice (I STILL Refuse to sit close to my monitor and Need Huge fonts to read from a distance!): The tables are fine, but the div's get ruined! So... Why are div's better? I'm reworking a website (still) and I use nothing but tables for this reason. That part is off topic, but the rest is valid! Just thought you'd want to see the distortion. It does make the "home", & etc, links impossible to access. I can still use the site, but finally found the post where you actually mentioned Div's vs Tables, so thought it was time to mention it. Peace.
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Post by Doan the Nado on Sept 9, 2006 9:46:26 GMT -5
Well, the main thing is the length of the written page source: the stuff I wrote for the Divs takes up about 20% of the space of the table stuff. Basically, I can say:
<div id="announcements"> Announcement Stuff </div> <div id="links"> Links </div> <div id="chat"> Chat Stuff </div>
and that's it. Beyond that, all I have to do is create a Style Sheet that says how everything should be displayed. This makes divs easier to write, easier to maintain, and quicker to load, because there is less text to be sent from the server to your browser.
If I wrote it in tables, it would look like:
<table> <tr> <td><table> <tr><td>Announcement Stuf</td></tr> <tr><td>Link Stuff</td></tr> </table></td> <td>Chat Stuff</td> </tr> </table>
and that's a really simplified version, using a table to actuall display everything. The way Proboards does it is a bit different. They actually have a table behind all the other tables which has a maroon background and nothing else, and then the other stuff is tables inside of that with the black background. It gets really messy...
That being said, if you are having the display problems that you are having, then a rewrite is probably in order. What should really happen is that the divs should expand to accomodate the text, but I gave them set heights, so that's not really possible. I had to do this in order to make the left side match up with the Chat. In the chat, the frame and the Chat textbox are a fixed size that I actually have to indicate in the page, which means that their div is largely a fixed size, so in order to match up the left side, I made it a fixed size as well.
My issue now is that I really want to get to work soon on an all-new system, and I'm not sure how much it's worth it to invest time in something that will probably not be around all that long. One thing I was considering was making that whole table be loaded from my site, so that I could do things such as store info on what should be displayed (i.e. Chat or no Chat, other options). I would like to add this sometime next week (or last week, but...), so your problems may be solved before too long.
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Post by Rodak on Sept 9, 2006 9:56:22 GMT -5
I thought text loaded fast and images held up load times!
I'm having load time problems on the site i'm trying to fix.
Much to learn.
But dont bother rewriting anything!
I am the only one who does that, I'm sure!
Just make chat it's own window next time (maybe) or even it's own "100% width" box so it can still have a fixed height?
I dunno.
Gotta Getta Booka boutsy ess-ess!
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Post by Doan the Nado on Sept 9, 2006 10:10:23 GMT -5
I thought text loaded fast and images held up load times! All that matters when it comes to load times is the size of what is loaded. If the page has more text, it will take longer to load, but with the speed of connections, however, the difference in two pure text pages is likely imperceptible. One place that you can see how long it takes a really long page to load is with the FreeBSD Handbook: it's entirely text, but it takes a bit of time to transfer it all to your browser. So if small differences in the amount of text aren't noticeable, then why does it matter? Well, when you're talking about bandwidth, it does matter. Loading a 6K page 10,000 times is about 59 MB of bandwidth, whereas a 3-4K page is about 34 MB of bandwidth. Not to mention that your style sheets can be stored in .css files, and then when the page instructs the browser to load the file, it will not be reloaded if it was already loaded once. That being said, I'm not really using divs the way they were intended at the top of the page. They are more for controlling the layout of the entire page, and not for creating a table at the top of the page, as I have tried to do. I should either rethink the layout, or switch to tables.
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Post by vespuleth on Sept 9, 2006 19:46:49 GMT -5
The other issue with tables is that its against convention to use them to determine layout. Tables should be used specifically for tabular data. And I forgot to reply to this thread ages ago. I think the site looks more intuitive this way.
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Post by Rodak on Sept 10, 2006 2:24:52 GMT -5
The other issue with tables is that its against convention to use them to determine layout. Tables should be used specifically for tabular data. And I forgot to reply to this thread ages ago. I think the site looks more intuitive this way. That's not an issue. That's a convention!! Why is it against convention? It's against convention to write poems about The Poopies and their efforts to conquer the world, but it works! I think using tables to determine layout is essential for cross browser functionality! Conformity to convention is only valid with a good reason, otherwise it's just blind conformity! Please explain further. I am too much of an old Hippy to accept "against convention" as a reason to do (or not do) Anything!! In fact... against convention is a Great reason To do things for me!
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Post by vespuleth on Sept 14, 2006 23:51:43 GMT -5
Yeah, I guess I should have expected that. W3C put out a standard that is supposed to be followed when coding and rendering HTML to allow the most cross platform portability. To get the standard to be the norm, the coders as well as the browser manufacturers have to conform to it. you can learn more at the site: www.w3c.org
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Post by Rodak on Sept 15, 2006 4:53:28 GMT -5
Ah.
Now that does make sense.
But if I'm working on a site which I want to look uniform across browsers... and div tags just don't work for my twisted way of coding (self taught ) ...
Hmm.
I think I need to find that great big book of html/css stuff on sale somewhere.
The last one I saw was so overpriced it was out of reach!
And the library has Old stuff!
I just can't learn well from online tutorials... I need a book!
Something I can hold while looking at my computer screen.
Having both on the computer just slows me down and navigating online pages instead of flipping through a book takes 20 times longer to find what you want...
(blah-blah-blah bitch moan complain) (whine and whimper) (cry) (look for more stuff to sell...)
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Post by vespuleth on Sept 15, 2006 13:25:36 GMT -5
I highly recommend O'Reilly's Web Design in a Nutshell. The entire book is about compliance to the standard and also to the accessability guidelines, and even gives tips on how to make sites cross platform when some platforms arent complying to the standard. I bought mine at Border's. Cost me 35 dollars.
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