Posted Tuesday, May 16, 2006 at 3:09 pm cdt
May 11, 2006: I received this troubling response from a lady in Northridge, CA on March 27, 2006:
I’m trying to use your fraction-to-decimal chart but I can’t see much of it because the box on the left side of the page (The Oo Kingdom, home, search, site map, etc) is covering it! Can you fix this or tell me how to? Thanks for an otherwise very helpful site!
Even this e-mail is being sent literally blindly because I can’t see what’s in the box! PLEASE HELP!!!
This site is laid out using CSS, so I changed a line of code so that the margin on the left-hand side is now done with padding instead of margin. This may help some older browsers, although I had already done extensive testing on various browsers and didn’t see any problem to begin with.
I didn’t get around to making the CSS change until April 19, 2006. I then replied to the lady in California but received no reply. If you are the person who sent me the note in March, and you are reading this, please let me know if the change worked. I don’t know what browser or operating system you’re using, so I can’t properly test it. Or if anyone else out there has experienced this problem in the past, please let me know if the site is displaying properly now. Thank you.
May 15, 2006: I have changed the layout of the site so that no absolute positioning is used in the CSS; therefore the problem described above cannot occur. This layout is new and is subject to change.
Today, May 16, 2006: The new layout was badly broken on some pages, on some browsers. Making the page a fixed width and centered, with the navigation bar on the right instead of the left, solved the problem, and I had to build in a “fudge factor” to fix the IE6/Windows “italic text width bug”: whenever italicized text begins on one line and wraps into the next line, IE6 for Windows makes the containing box a few pixels bigger, which can potentially break floats and hence, the layout. To fix this, I made the big box which holds the main content, four pixels narrower than it would otherwise need to be. There! All of the problems relating to layout on The Oo Kingdom appear to be solved. If anyone finds a bug other than what I have noted below, by all means please contact me.