Week 04 - In Class Exercise

Status:
Poem (Get | CSS | Validate | Upload)
Scribbles about it

Will update later.

4-1-2008:
The background image for the poem might actually be too large, both in terms of viewing size and in terms of byte size. However, because I am only loading the background image and a bunch of text, I think the byte size is forgivable. The transparency looks good (or at least in my humble opinion).

As to the appearance, it's deliberately noise-ified and crosshatched in Photoshop to give it a fairly blurry image. The image is that of a dove, with another one towards the tip of its left wing; dove = peace, so the whole intent is to fit the image with the poem. My feeling is that the poet cannot find a clear image of peace, hence the fuzziness of the dove.

I want to keep everything fairly clean, quiet, and somber, so the darker background with gray-ish text seems to mood-out well. The only text, other than the poem, is the update and the Index page link.

I used the overflow attribute for the poem div container because then it would be just as easy to swap any text out for another one, without changing the container limits or the look of the page. And I used it to conveniently hide the W3C verification, because while the verification is very nice and all that, I did not want to ruin my background...

One thing I'm fairly unsure about is the scrollbar. Overflow is nice, but the scrollbar-look kind of cramps my style, because changing it would be a bit of a NO in validation. Practically no browsers support it except IE. I myself use Firefox. So it's a necessary evil?

Apparently the [target=""] attribute does not exist in XHTML 1.1 Strict. I myself prefer opening new tabs/windows to pressing the back button, but the standards say NO to that too. I suppose every user out there knows that you can depress the mouse wheel to open a new window. I suppose every user out there knows that you can hold onto the Ctrl (not sure about Macs) and click to open a new window.

Unless the browser window is shrunk to epically small proportions, the CSS Poem page will view fine. The image in the background is fixed to the top right. Large or small, it will stay clean of the poem, which has its own background to guard it if the window is too small. The CSS uses as little precise positioning as possible (i.e. the poem container is actually that far down because I abused the padding in the overall container) so that any resizing would mean the elements arrange themselves accordingly, rather than nagging the browser with horizontal scrollbars.

EDIT: I should probably credit the picture of the dove as coming from the ending animation of the Sunrise production Mobile Suit Gundam 00.