Frameborders

dahamsta

Is there any standards-compliant way to fix the size and colour of a frameborder? On my feedreader I used to set border-bottom to "1px solid #000000", but that seems icky and it doesn't work on Gecko browsers. I've added a FRAMEBORDER attribute to the FRAME tag now, but it's ugly as heck. Any tips?

adam

daveirl

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daveirl

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dahamsta

You could be right there. I seem to remember the border appear for a second or so while the frameset is loading, and then disappearing. I got the same behaviour when I tried it in Hotmail earlier today. I'll give it a go, thanks!

Thanks for the compliment by the way. I fired it together in a couple of hours but it's still very immature. Lots of tinkering involved.

adam

p

Have you got rid of the frames since you posted this last?

Anyway, if you're trying to be all compliant you should probably ditch the tables, it'll render faster as well, and be easier to code.

http://www.realworldstyle.com/thumbs_3.html

That technique may suit you.

dahamsta

Originally posted by p
Have you got rid of the frames since you posted this last?

Nope. The framing bit comes when you click on a headline. To be honest I haven't gone anywhere near it, Pheed is one of those projects that gets hacked when I have a little spare time.

Anyway, if you're trying to be all compliant you should probably ditch the tables, it'll render faster as well, and be easier to code.

And it won't work, unfortunately. CSS support for columnar layouts is shocking. The amount of sites out there with (non-standard) tips and tricks for columnar layouts should be testament enough. ("If you do $this, and $that, $this'll work for IE and $that'll work for Moz and $theOther will work for Opera." Mmmkay. )

I'm not all that bothered about standards-compliance, I think people get far too het up about it, almost religious. It's my own fault though, I should have said "cross-browser".

adam

p

Originally posted by dahamsta
Nope. The framing bit comes when you click on a headline. To be honest I haven't gone anywhere near it, Pheed is one of those projects that gets hacked when I have a little spare time.

Well it's easy to get the border rid of if you're not caring about standards, see this for many ways:

http://www.stopdesign.com/experiments/frames/frameset.html

And it won't work, unfortunately. CSS support for columnar layouts is shocking. The amount of sites out there with (non-standard) tips and tricks for columnar layouts should be testament enough. ("If you do $this, and $that, $this'll work for IE and $that'll work for Moz and $theOther will work for Opera." Mmmkay. )

With all due respect, you're pretty out of touch on those issues. Your layout would be amazingly simple to implement. There are problems with CSS, but people are figuring out better ways of working around the issue, as people's experience grows. And the CSS hacks are still a lot better than table hacks.

I'm not all that bothered about standards-compliance, I think people get far too het up about it, almost religious. It's my own fault though, I should have said "cross-browser".

Indeed you should have. But hopefully the link above will answer that question. Though I'd advise you that if you're not going to try write standard code you should take out your doctype.

People are religious about open standards, but then people, there's very good reasons for them. I think you should ignore the zealots, and look at the facts. There's not decent argument against standards.

- Kevin

dahamsta

Originally posted by p
Well it's easy to get the border rid of

Heh, if it were as simple as getting rid of it I wouldn't be posting. I was trying to fix it to a height and colour, in a way that would render the same in most browsers. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be possible to style frameborders, but I got around it by making the top frame one pixel larger and setting a background image that makes it look like the border I wanted. It's a hack, but such is life with HTML.

if you're not caring about standards

Not what I said p, I said that "I'm not all that bothered about standards-compliance". Where possible, I'd prefer to use standards-compliant code. Unfortunately that's next to impossible for many of the things I want to do with HTML. Like centering a layer on the page without having to use text-align. Yes, I know that one is Microsoft's fault entirely, but I'm still stuck with it while IE is so popular.

With all due respect, you're pretty out of touch on those issues. Your layout would be amazingly simple to implement.

That could well be true p, it's pretty likely that I'm not completely up to speed on XHTML and CSS; but with respect in return, you're not up to speed on what I want to do here either. The number of columns in Pheed is configurable (something else that was a bastard to hack) and it's extremely difficult to get it to flip from, for example, three columns to five without major HTML/CSS output modification all over the shop, which in turn requires a bog-load of PHP code. That's on top of the hackage that needs to be done to get three-, four- and more-column layouts rendering consistently across browsers in the first place.

And the CSS hacks are still a lot better than table hacks.

I don't see why having to resort to a hack in CSS is any better (or worse) than doing it by some other method. A hack's a hack, they're equally "bad".

People are religious about open standards, but then people, there's very good reasons for them. I think you should ignore the zealots, and look at the facts.

It's very hard to ignore the zealots. They're a bloody noisy bunch.

Anyway I'm sorted now, so thanks everyone. Back to the next hack -- multi-user configurations!

adam

p

Cheers for the reply.

Still, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the variable colums thing is a lot easier to program too.

e.g. for a 5 colum layout all you need is a <div class="source"> ... </div> for each entry.

To change the columns then, you only need to this.

3 columns, your css would just be:

.source { width: 32%}

or for a five colum layout

.source { width: 20%}

Might be worth giving it a shot. The whole CSS thing (irregardless of standards) and seperation of style code and logic code, can be really useful to coders.

Good luck whatever you do anyways, looks like a cool toy.

dahamsta

No offense p, but when it's this complicated to get a simple three-column layout to render correctly in most browsers, I find it difficult to believe that it's possible to flip column numbers simply by changing the width parameter. Feel free to prove me wrong with some code though.

By the way, you don't need to tell me that separation of content and style is wonderful, and believe me, it's even more wonderful when you can separate logic too. I just don't see the point of such enthusiasm when we still don't have the standards and/or tools to support it.

adam