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 hope I don’t have a day like yesterday again for a long time. I still can’t believe the number of totally unconnected things that went wrong — from spilling my coffee all over my pants to the server at work losing 1/2 its brains. At 10:30 last night, while finishing the last of the clean-up, all I could think was, “Please don’t throw anything else at me!”

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

Reasoning that at one time I was a fairly competent programmer and should be able to troubleshoot a little problem like a flashing cursor, I set about having a go at figuring out what was causing the problem.

After tearing a page apart piece by piece until the problem stopped, I came up with the following answer: It happens when a page has been loaded into an iframe on a main page that has an animated graphic.

Curses!

I now go in search of a solution. I might almost be willing to give up my happy little mommy monster logo. But the weather graphic in the upper left corner won’t make nearly as much sense if it isn’t animated.

I suppose the other choice would be to give up iframes. But, darnit, it works well.