Rodent Regatta

Books are too expensive. Both of Eric Meyer’s books list for $45.00 each. Fortunately, I don’t pay that, but they’re steep nonetheless.

I’m hoping that by reading book 1 and book 2, I can figure out how to do some of my own redesign work. I know, I know – not a chance – but hope springs eternal.

Remember, I have no idea at all why you are visiting Rodent Regatta, but if you leave a trackback or a comment, the link will be via stevepilgrim.com. And, in spite of that, I’m going to learn CSS. Stop laughing, you’ll hurt my feelings!

Anyhow, I bought some things that are likely to go back to the store, but I want to determine whether they are worth owning permanently or not.

I’ve spent enough on design fees, consultation, software, training courses and books that you’d think pretty soon this $5000.00 education would begin to pay off in some semblance of a style sheet and a weblog that validates. That must be the four-year program, though.

I asked about drop shadows on images earlier this week. I’ve just about concluded that the answer is to set up a div or id or class or something in CSS that is specifically for images. It will include the drop shadow effect. Don’t ask me how to do it, but I’m under the impression it’s the ”right” way.

Today, I’ve got another simply question. How do you copy and paste a table of information from a text document into a weblog entry? An image of the table I’m talking about can be seen here. Had I wanted to ”quote” that table here, how was I to do it? Did I need to have the foresight when the original style sheet was created, so that another div or class or id was waiting for me to use it on a table of common stocks?

Am I supposed to truly turn it into an XHTML table with a header row and table rows? That takes forever! What’s the proper way to handle this sort of thing? If there can be so many opinions about how to represent an address in XHTML, there must be a thousand opinions about tables that are really tables.

Just the act of creating a thumbnail in the two different programs required to do that work, followed by uploading the larger image and the thumbnail…well, it is all very involved and tedious. Surely, the experts have got a streamlined way to copy and paste a portion of a text document without going through what I’ve had to go through.

Visiting Chris Pederick’s site this evening, I found two entries that begin to answer some of my questions. The first points to a toolbar for IE6 that mimics many of the features in Chris’s own Web Developer Extension for Firefox. That was a link to molly.com.

The second was a link to Sitepoint where Five Free Windows Web Design Apps You Can’t Live Without are covered.

Still no word on what’s gone wrong or how to fix my copy of Firefox, but we’ll continue to seek ways to overcome the trouble. I’m also beginning to get my head around answers to some of the questions I posed earlier today. Stay tuned this week!

Are you better off with images that include the drop shadow, or should you use any of the various CSS Drop Shadow techniques to apply drop shadows to an entire group of block elements?

Let’s take an example. Look at this site, and notice the thumbnails of screenshots. Those thumbnails include the drop shadow within the image. When you click on a thumbnail, you see the drop shadow as part of the larger image. [Note: This also brings to mind a question about the ”best way” to handle the posting of thumbnails and larger images. Does a well-managed site include a style guide for the size of the thumbnail and the size of the larger image? >From one article or entry to the next, how do you recall what size your thumbnails have been in the past?]

Back to the topic at hand. If there is a way to apply a CSS-based drop shadow, why wouldn’t it be applied to images? Surely images that include drop shadows are larger files than those that don’t. Why wouldn’t the CSS drop shadow technique be assigned to a block element?

Is one way preferred over the other?

Here’s another tangential question: is there an inexpensive tool in the Windows world that accomplishes what ImageWell accomplishes for Macintosh users?

Ben Hammersley points the way to a web standards checklist. It’s a useful resource and set of reminders.