Electrolite: Your technical staff at work

March 16, 2002

Your technical staff at work Spent part of the morning carefully adjusting type sizes, background shades, and link colors in my never-ending quest to provide you, yes you with a Quality User Experience. As the slogan of the first World Science Fiction Convention (New York, 1939) had it, “Unendurable Pleasure, Infinitely Prolonged!” Then a friend flew in from out of town, plopped his TiBook onto our kitchen table, plugged into our home network, and loaded my page into Microsoft Internet Explorer…which displayed exactly none of my wonderful, yet subtle and understated, improvements.

Moral: once MSIE (the Mac version, at any rate) loads a CSS style sheet for a particular page, it’ll keep using that version until the user restarts the browser or empties the disk cache. Reloading the page won’t necessarily kick the browser into reloading the style sheet; it’ll just keep looking at new content with the old styles. So if you feel your Electrolite experience is lacking something, empty your disk cache and reload. Warning: effects may appear over a period of several days. If hair loss or extra eyeballs occur, consult your theologian.

(Subsidiary moral: People who own TiBooks should be killed, until I own one.) [11:14 PM]

Welcome to Electrolite's comments section.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

Comments on Your technical staff at work:

Erik V. Olson ::: (view all by) ::: March 17, 2002, 11:21 AM:

Ceci nes pas un post.

Cory Doctorow ::: (view all by) ::: March 17, 2002, 11:41 AM:

Patrick, how about posting a screenshot of something that has changed in your stylesheet, so that I can compare and see if my browser is using the current CSS?aaAlso, put in a link to the stylesheet -- maybe opening that in the browser and reloading it will work.

Bruce Baugh ::: (view all by) ::: March 17, 2002, 02:46 PM:

The current style looks really good in OmniWeb 4.1b1 on my iBook and iMac, Patrick. Up until this last overhaul, links were appearing significantly smaller than the surrounding text, and somewhat mispositioned. Now they don't.

Beth Bernobich ::: (view all by) ::: March 17, 2002, 02:48 PM:

And here I thought my eyesight was shifting again. (For which piece of information I thank you, Patrick, though I can't recall which entry talked about age and wobbly eyesight.) Electrolite -- source of pithy political insights, Patrick O'Brian quotes, and medical tidbits.aaFor what it's worth, I like the design changes -- very clean and easy to follow.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: March 17, 2002, 08:42 PM:

If the links go from blue to dropout-against-red when you hover the mouse over them, you've loaded the current CSS.aaBruce, I'm glad you're happy reading Electrolite with the latest beta of OmniWeb, but honesty compels me to point out that in fact I have the same version, and what I see is missing the entire right-hand column. This is because OmniWeb, for all that it absolutely kicks ass at rendering web pages in beautiful anti-aliased fonts, still doesn't support even CSS1. Sorry about that.

Bruce Baugh ::: (view all by) ::: March 18, 2002, 03:25 AM:

Okay, you've got me there. I didn't know there was a right-hand column. Foo. I guess I should have said that what I saw and see looks good. :)

Ginger Stampley ::: (view all by) ::: March 18, 2002, 07:59 AM:

I am currently reviewing and playing around with CSS for my own web site. The basic MT style sheet has a problem with slipping columns, and as far as I can tell on IE/NS Win/Mac OS9, the glish.com stuff works.aaAnd please don't hate me because I have a TiBook. As penance, I haven't had a real vacation in which to take it on the road in almost a year.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: March 18, 2002, 08:24 AM:

That glish.com page is a gold mine. Thanks, Ginger.

Kate Nepveu ::: (view all by) ::: March 18, 2002, 05:42 PM:

Today's lesson: Don't hit "enter" to tell IE "yes, use _that_ drop-down entry," or it will post a blank comment (at least until/unless PNH can delete it).aaPatrick, the new CSS looks nice here, though I haven't had the chance to try this out on a smaller monitor/non-IE browser. I actually liked the timestamp/comments link at the _bottom_ of the post, though, as otherwise I find myself reading a new entry and then scrolling back up to see if there are any comments to read, as well.

Kate Nepveu ::: (view all by) ::: March 18, 2002, 05:47 PM:

(Or, it sure looked like it posted a blank comment. Cool, if it's smart enough not to do so.)

Matt McIrvin ::: (view all by) ::: March 18, 2002, 11:02 PM:

What version of MSIE/Mac is he using?aaI've seen this bug, but only for pages located *on the local machine* and displayed with file: URLs. I think it was more widespread in some earlier 5.x versions than in the latest ones.aa(Actually, for all I know it may well have reappeared in the OS X version; I use OmniWeb most of the time now, and it's been some time since I messed with my style sheets in a big way.)aa(By the way, if you use OmniWeb, you might want to check out some of the recent sneakypeek builds. Sneakypeek 57 is much superior even to 4.1b1-- performance is better and they've got a bit more of CSS working, though it's still far from done.)