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Salty · May 5, 2006, 02:18 AM

OK... yes I know what you're all thinking.

Anyway, my blog pastoralwannabe.blogspot.com is having a weird problem where any punctuation like "" for example that I copy and paste out of a pages document or anywhere else, is showing up as several different symbols.
This is getting kinda frustrating since I normally post my poetry which I always write first in Pages, and then copy and paste in.
Anyway I've only noticed this problem since I edited my template so I'm wondering if maybe I screwed up something with the CSS... but I can't think of anything that I did that would have resulted in this. So anyone got anything they can offer me for help?

CharlesS · May 5, 2006, 02:30 AM

That's probably because of different browsers having different default encodings. Two ways to fix this:

1. Put a <meta> tag inside your page's <head> tag that tells what encoding the page is using: for example, if you're using UTF-8, it'd be:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>

2. Instead of putting special characters like é, ü, “, and ” directly into the page, you can use HTML entities such as é ü “ ” instead, and they'll render correctly no matter what the encoding is.

You can search Google for comprehensive lists of the available HTML entities that you can use.

Salty · May 5, 2006, 03:24 AM

Thank You So Much!

Doofy · May 5, 2006, 05:23 AM

Originally Posted by Salty

This is getting kinda frustrating since I normally post my poetry which I always write first in Pages, and then copy and paste in.

Bizarre.

Did someone steal your copy of TextEdit? I mean, what advantages do you actually get from composing in Pages over TE?

Salty · May 5, 2006, 03:07 PM

More formatting options. Not to mention I just like standardizing on one format. I just like Pages more. I used to always use TextEdit but... I dono sometimes you just wanna write in pages... probably I just like the icons more haha... they really are on the same level for basic writing. That said good luck doing something like this http://clayshaker.com/mbp/OhSoChristlike.pdf in TextEdit.

Obi Wan's Ghost · May 5, 2006, 03:31 PM

I can't believe you did a putdown of CSS! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

xi_hyperon · May 5, 2006, 03:36 PM

Perhaps your blog is not accustomed to punctuation, other than the occasional ellipsis.

Salty · May 5, 2006, 03:48 PM

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

I can't believe you did a putdown of CSS! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I can't stand CSS! It doesn't make bloody sense!

Adam Betts · May 5, 2006, 03:53 PM

About time you got a blog

CSS rocks. I love it so much although the learning curve is a bit too steep.

HTML for easy life
CSS for unlimited creativity in design

xi_hyperon · May 5, 2006, 03:59 PM

Originally Posted by Adam Betts

About time you got a blog

CSS rocks. I love it so much although the learning curve is a bit too steep.

HTML for easy life
CSS for unlimited creativity in design

CSS is a bit confusing at first, because you have to unlearn the idea of structure and presentation in one document (html). After awhile, it becomes second nature. Except for figuring out the weird IE bugs, that is.

Obi Wan's Ghost · May 5, 2006, 04:07 PM

Originally Posted by Salty

I can't stand CSS! It doesn't make bloody sense!

Take it one step at a time starting with the easy typography, then go to classes, then go to IDs, then positioning. You will love it if you don't leapfrog the basics.

baw · May 5, 2006, 04:24 PM

My Blog Has Been Fubared!

Really? Seems you created this thread with no problems.

CharlesS · May 5, 2006, 05:37 PM

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

I can't believe you did a putdown of CSS! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

CSS seems like a great way to make it easy for idiots to make web sites that require the browser window to be set to a width greater than that of your screen or do things that make it impossible for a color-blind person to use the site - i.e. remove the underlines on links that are of a color that, to me, looks indistinguishable from the regular text color of the site, so that I have to scrub the mouse over every word on the entire page just to figure out where the links are.

It also seem to be complicated enough that browsers, such as IE, never seem to be able to render it just right, causing people to design pages that work around bugs in IE, causing those pages not to look right in any browser other than IE. Yay for complexity!

Remember when web pages were just a bunch of text with graphics added here and there, and they conveyed their information in a clear, non-fancy way, were easy to read, didn't require a Ph.D. in web design to create, and could be viewed just fine by any damn browser out there? I do!

Chuckit · May 5, 2006, 05:43 PM

You know that if you need underlines on your links, you are able to use a custom style sheet in most browsers to enforce the underline, right?

CharlesS · May 5, 2006, 05:49 PM

Yeah, and I actually ended up doing that. But it was annoying to have to do so. And of course, I'm not always at my home computer. Sometimes I'm at the library or some other public computer lab...

Those damn underlines were put there when the Web browser was invented for a reason. They made it obvious what was a link and what was not. Nowadays, even if you have color-normal vision, every time someone uses a boldface, a different color, etc. in a chunk of text, you have to scrub over it to see if it's a link or not.

Stradlater · May 5, 2006, 05:50 PM

Salty, nice new sig

xi_hyperon · May 5, 2006, 05:50 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

CSS seems like a great way to make it easy for idiots to make web sites that require the browser window to be set to a width greater than that of your screen or do things that make it impossible for a color-blind person to use the site - i.e. remove the underlines on links that are of a color that, to me, looks indistinguishable from the regular text color of the site, so that I have to scrub the mouse over every word on the entire page just to figure out where the links are.

It also seem to be complicated enough that browsers, such as IE, never seem to be able to render it just right, causing people to design pages that work around bugs in IE, causing those pages not to look right in any browser other than IE. Yay for complexity!

Remember when web pages were just a bunch of text with graphics added here and there, and they conveyed their information in a clear, non-fancy way, were easy to read, didn't require a Ph.D. in web design to create, and could be viewed just fine by any damn browser out there? I do!

As evidenced on the Web, it is just as easy to make an unusable site with just HTML. One doesn't need a special tool for that.

Doofy · May 5, 2006, 07:13 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Remember when web pages were just a bunch of text with graphics added here and there, and they conveyed their information in a clear, non-fancy way, were easy to read, didn't require a Ph.D. in web design to create, and could be viewed just fine by any damn browser out there? I do!

Word.

CSS positioning was invented by geeks to keep themselves in employment.

brassplayersrock² · May 5, 2006, 07:29 PM

Originally Posted by Stradlater

Salty, nice new sig

seconded

Chuckit · May 5, 2006, 07:54 PM

Originally Posted by Doofy

Word.

CSS positioning was invented by geeks to keep themselves in employment.

Not really. People want sites that look fancy, like print designs. If it weren't possible to do that with normal HTML pages, more people would be using lots of images for text (ugh) or we'd be seeing even more Flash sites (ughier still).

I mean, there are some big problems with CSS, but the fact that it allows Web designers to create both better and worse designs than they could without it is not one of them. And it is better than the alternatives.

tooki · May 5, 2006, 08:07 PM

I think CSS's biggest advantage is that it allows total separation of content and formatting. This is extremely powerful, because it allows you to a) redesign a whole site without having to touch the content, saving tremendous amounts of time, and b) use separate stylesheets for different formats, such as screen and print. No more having to have a print-preview link on a page: just print, and you get a custom print layout.

tooki

Spliff · May 5, 2006, 08:30 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Remember when web pages were just a bunch of text with graphics added here and there, and they conveyed their information in a clear, non-fancy way, were easy to read, didn't require a Ph.D. in web design to create, and could be viewed just fine by any damn browser out there? I do!

You just described my favourite kind of website. Elegant fonts, text-based, with few photos and no ****ing javascript, flash, roll-overs, etc.

xi_hyperon · May 5, 2006, 08:39 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

I think CSS's biggest advantage is that it allows total separation of content and formatting. This is extremely powerful, because it allows you to a) redesign a whole site without having to touch the content, saving tremendous amounts of time, and b) use separate stylesheets for different formats, such as screen and print. No more having to have a print-preview link on a page: just print, and you get a custom print layout.

tooki

Yup. The same flexibility in styling can also benefit the visually impaired, via different screen styles.

Doofy · May 5, 2006, 09:26 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

use separate stylesheets for different formats, such as screen and print. No more having to have a print-preview link on a page: just print, and you get a custom print layout.

No! You'll get me started on ISO paper sizes vs United States!

dcmacdaddy · May 5, 2006, 09:38 PM

Originally Posted by xi_hyperon

CSS is a bit confusing at first, because you have to unlearn the idea of structure and presentation in one document (html). After awhile, it becomes second nature. Except for figuring out the weird IE bugs, that is.

Originally Posted by tooki

I think CSS's biggest advantage is that it allows total separation of content and formatting. This is extremely powerful, because it allows you to a) redesign a whole site without having to touch the content, saving tremendous amounts of time, and b) use separate stylesheets for different formats, such as screen and print. No more having to have a print-preview link on a page: just print, and you get a custom print layout.

tooki

OK?!? That's two of you who have indicated that CSS keeps content and formatting separate. How does that work? What does a CSS content page look like compared to an HTML content page? And what is a CSS formatting page like?

Enquiring minds want to know. Thanks!

himself · May 5, 2006, 09:46 PM

Originally Posted by Salty

More formatting options. Not to mention I just like standardizing on one format. I just like Pages more. I used to always use TextEdit but... I dono sometimes you just wanna write in pages... probably I just like the icons more haha... they really are on the same level for basic writing. That said good luck doing something like this http://clayshaker.com/mbp/OhSoChristlike.pdf in TextEdit.

that can be done in TextEdit too, you just have to set your tabs properly.

himself · 10:05 PM

Originally Posted by dcmacdaddy

OK?!? That's two of you who have indicated that CSS keeps content and formatting separate. How does that work? What does a CSS content page look like compared to an HTML content page? And what is a CSS formatting page like?

Enquiring minds want to know. Thanks!

A "CSS content page" is just a plain HTML page, no background colors, no text formatting, sometimes no images. Here's an example.

This is a sample CSS file, created for the above HTML example.

Look at the other examples at CSS Zen Garden. All of the examples there use the exact same HTML file, but each designer creates their own stylesheet for that HTML.

The cool thing about CSS is that it encourages you to simplify. The resulting HTML code is much leaner and easier to read in case someone has to come behind you and edit your code. Plus, with one CSS file you can control the presentation of an entire web site, as opposed to going in and modifying a web site's appearance one page at a time. Not only that, CSS provides many more styling options (especially wih regards to typography) than plain HTML ever could, and in a much more elegant manner. All we need now are monoliths like Microsoft to play ball (in good faith), but there are tools to work around their shortcomings anyway.

ghporter · May 5, 2006, 09:58 PM

CSS can be overused; look at the worst of MySpace or Geocities pages for examples...

I'd rather have everything coded by hand than overuse CSS (or any other tool), but as tooki points out, since the style sheets are separate from the content, you can do a whole lot of formatting without touching a single character of content-which is an important thing both after the fact (fixing or tweaking an existing page) and (most importantly) BEFORE selecting your content in the first place. With a well-tuned set of style sheets, you can update your content without having to play with formatting details, making the process faster and painless.

But it's not for everyone. I see it as like getting used to object-oriented programming. I was SOLIDLY procedural, and pretty good at it, when that last semester offered "Object Oriented Programming with C++." Now if the instructor had been worthwhile, I might have figured it out pretty quickly, but he wasn't, so I had to "pick it up in the gutter," and on my own. (Aside: how would you rate a programming instructor that takes HALF A CHALK BOARD to sketch out traversing a linked list in C?)

Obi Wan's Ghost · May 5, 2006, 11:49 PM

MySpace is the worst site ever. Slow, bad design, crashy, noisy, its like 1995 came back bigger and badder to make our modern machines feel slow.

Salty · May 6, 2006, 01:10 AM

I HATE MySpace... that bloody player of theirs that makes the whole page look like garbage! Do I have a MySpace? Unfortunately yah it basically points to my blog and lets friends ad me... actually I wonder if I could add some code to my page that would auto forward people to my blog or something

... anyway... yah... I hate that site makes my browser feel like... insanely slow! Huge bandwidth hogging images, and sooo many audio clips! And those ads are freakishly annoying! It reminds me of the older MSN page.
Actually I think MySpace is the anti google.

Salty · May 6, 2006, 01:11 AM

Oh and thanks to everyone on the sig

. IT's the first one in a long time that hasn't had a chicken in it. If you want to see the sketch of me fuller res, then check out my blog. It's one of the best thing I've ever done with my tablet. I stepped back after I was done and found that I really couldn't think of a better sketch of myself that I'd ever done.

Salty · May 6, 2006, 04:09 AM

Actually you know what I'll just post a larger version of the image

Ozmodiar · May 6, 2006, 05:14 AM

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm

Been a staple of my bookmarks bar for several years now.

Ozmodiar · May 6, 2006, 05:16 AM

P.S. I can't even BELIEVE there's a debate in here on the merits of CSS. It's ****ing 2006! Who still uses tables and spacer gifs?

Chris O'Brien · May 6, 2006, 07:45 AM

Originally Posted by Ozmodiar

P.S. I can't even BELIEVE there's a debate in here on the merits of CSS. It's ****ing 2006! Who still uses tables and spacer gifs?

I was just about to post the exact same thing, but you beat me to it.

xi_hyperon · May 6, 2006, 02:06 PM

Originally Posted by Ozmodiar

P.S. I can't even BELIEVE there's a debate in here on the merits of CSS. It's ****ing 2006! Who still uses tables and spacer gifs?

The lounge is bizarro world. Here, web standards are bad.

Salty · May 6, 2006, 04:11 PM

The problem is that web standards aren't all standards! And of course yes we can blame Microsoft for that... but I have no idea why on earth the people who made CSS didn't copyright it or whatever so that if Microsoft was going to say they were CSS compliant then they'd HAVE to be 100% compliant?

By the way I've never had problems with tables! And CSS Doesn't make sense to me. And apps like Dreamweaver certainly don't help you with it! Least... I don't feel as if they do.

CharlesS · May 6, 2006, 04:48 PM

Originally Posted by xi_hyperon

The lounge is bizarro world. Here, web standards are bad.

I'm just a bit nostalgic for the old days, when everything was simple and you didn't have to worry about "will this page work in this browser or not?" and when web designers didn't seem to think that web pages needed to look fancy like a print publication all the time.

Can you imagine what it would be like trying to browse the modern Web with a 56K modem?

Though maybe this is just the first step in my eventual transformation into an old fogy...

Ozmodiar · May 6, 2006, 05:14 PM

Originally Posted by Salty

The problem is that web standards aren't all standards! And of course yes we can blame Microsoft for that... but I have no idea why on earth the people who made CSS didn't copyright it or whatever so that if Microsoft was going to say they were CSS compliant then they'd HAVE to be 100% compliant?

By the way I've never had problems with tables! And CSS Doesn't make sense to me. And apps like Dreamweaver certainly don't help you with it! Least... I don't feel as if they do.

IE 7 fully embraces standards, and by 7.5 should render every page like Firefox and Safari. Besides, it's not that hard to make sites that work cross-platform and cross-browser, it just takes a little time. I don't use (or even know) any javascript hacks in my CSS to make things work.

Also, Dreamweaver sucks. I would prefer any code-level editing program over something that puts in dummy markup wherever it can. Separating the structure elements from the design elements is the greatest thing that ever happened to web design. When I look at an HTML or PHP document that I hand-coded, I can immediately tell what every block of text is going to look like and do. Compared to what the likes of Dreamweaver and GoLive spew out I much prefer having simple, streamlined markup documents to thousands of lines of needless table tags.

Chuckit · May 6, 2006, 05:16 PM

Although the modern Internet would be bad on a 56K modem, CSS can actually help loading time by allowing the browser to cache a site's style information. Then it doesn't have to waste time loading 15,000 nested tables and formatting tags for each page like it did before people used CSS.

Salty · May 6, 2006, 06:44 PM

I still can't wrap my head around how you even know where everything is going to be on the page. That part still doesn't make sense to me.

andi*pandi · May 6, 2006, 07:28 PM

take a class in Java and have to create an application using JPanels.

Then learning CSS will seem easy.

(worked for me!)

xi_hyperon · May 6, 2006, 07:31 PM

Salty, there's no shortage of resource material on the Web from which to learn CSS, if you really want to. It can be confusing at first, but honestly, it's not rocket science.

And do not use Dreamweaver as your tool of choice for CSS. If you need a WYSIWYG editor, then try StyleMaster or CSSEdit. Dreamweaver is an HTML program with some CSS features tacked-on, and if that's what you're using, then it's no wonder you're confused.

Regardless, I suggest to learn by doing. As mentioned, you can find tutorials online easily enough. If you're the type who prefers books to reading online, then I would suggest looking up and ordering one of the Eric Meyer on CSS books. Each one has 10 or so projects to complete and learn from, ranging from dirt simple to the more complex. He explains what causes what to happen, and why, and he does so in a very easy-to-understand manner.

Good luck, and good coding.

Ozmodiar · May 7, 2006, 01:57 AM

http://www.webmonkey.com//authoring/...tutorial1.html

That's where I got started with CSS. It's pretty old (at least three years) and there may be better tutorials out there by now, but I recommend it as a starting point.

Salty · May 7, 2006, 08:54 PM

CSSEDit was super helpful! Check out my blog now! It looks far better... I actually just edited a different template only this time I didn't have to fubar anything! I still have a bit of trouble understanding how things are getting positioned...

Adam Betts · May 7, 2006, 09:53 PM

Nice

Salty · May 7, 2006, 10:57 PM

Originally Posted by Adam Betts

Nice

Adam said my blog was nice? Dude... coming from someone who I really respect as a web designer... that means something

Thanks.