There’s a thunderstorm right now. The little weather gif in the corner is showing lightening strikes. It looks cool. 🙂

I can hear the thunder boom outside. I love thunderstorms. Thank you, Thor!

Adam’s down at Pioneer Courthouse Square to hear Kerry speak. I hope he and his friends don’t get drenched.

The good news is that mommymonster.com is now much more “styled” as far as CSS goes. I ran into some strangeness with some of the browsers, but for the most part it all works OK.

I tried out the DHTML scroller and found it not to be a suitable solution. It, and all of the ones I found, work by moving the external page first into an iframe and then moving the iframe contents into a div. Doing so loses all of the header info in the external page. That meant I would have had to move almost all of my pages — including this one — to pop-up windows. Ick, and no thanks.

mommymonster uses iframes and javascript. If you use Opera… oh well. Deal with it.

So… what have I been up to?

I’ve found a really cool little script from Angus Turnbull that may free me from the dreaded iframes (even though I like them). In prep for trying that out, I’m constructing a nice little external style sheet and making sure that all of the mommymonster.com pages have it applied. Meant to do that anyway.

It’s nice to have diversions.

The browser, that is.

Why can’t Opera behave like a normal browser? I like Opera a lot. I think it’s a great browser. It claims to have the best CSS2 support. It claims.

Opera allows the operating system to draw all inline frames, which means that frames are no longer in the control of the browser, are no longer positioned objects, and are no longer 3-dimensional. So iframes are always on top. Always. And my menus will never work with Opera, because they will always get shoved under the iframe.

In looking at the W3C documentation, it sure looks to me as though iframes should be positioned objects, and z-index should have meaning. IE, Netscape and Firebird all interpret it that way.

According to Opera’s forum, they’re thinking about looking into this in “the future.” And that leave a heck of a lot of iframe-laden web sites out in the cold as far as Opera goes.

I could redesign to get rid of the iframe. But it resizes correctly, degrades nicely and allows for fast page loads. With the amount of graphics on mm, I don’t want to reload every page every time. And I can’t come up with an option that would work as well.

Good thing nobody else comes here. 🙂

Finally got the links page done. I cheated and just exported my bookmarks, and then massaged a bit. Dreamweaver chokes on the exported HTML file so I have to tweak it in notepad. Meh.

Maybe I’ll redo some of the weather images. It’s “light rain” right now, and I notice it does look a bit hokey. Cloudy is OK, but precipitation definitely needs some rework.

I haven’t come up with a solution. I briefly contemplated changing all of the gifs to Flash movies. But the mommy logo would be tough to turn into Flash because of the transparent background. The weather gif is loaded via a php call and an hour of messing around with various calls to various objects couldn’t get it to load right as a .swf vs .gif. Probably because I don’t really know what I’m doing.

While banging my head against the keyboard in frustration, I decided to do one more search for the answer and brought up Yahoo. There was a Flash ad running, and when I put my cursor into the text box to type in my search criteria, my little insertion point flashed like a neon light in Times Square.

I decided I can live with it flashing away on mommymonster.com. There aren’t that many text entry opportunities, nobody else comes here anyway, and I have a short attention span. And it only happens with IE. Mozilla and Opera are handling the insertion point OK without the flashes. Of course, the menus don’t work as well in those…

arrrrrgggggghhhhhh it’s endless