As you may have noticed, I've got a new design for this blog. I'm afraid to ask y'all what you think of it -- I've gotten a few nice comments, but I haven't done much cross-platform testing and for all I know to most of you it looks like a tornado at the tile factory.
I did it in part because it was overdue and in part because I was long overdue for an immersion in CSS. Since I've hacked my own blog in PHP and perl rather than using MT or some other off-the-shelf tool, rewriting everything to use CSS made me get into the nitty-gritty. I can't say it was entirely fun but it had its moments.
Now, though, I'm about ready to scream and go back to Mosaic and HTML 1.0. One of the big advantages of CSS is supposed to be that if you do it right you can avoid a lot of browser dependencies. At least that's the gospel Jeffrey Zeldman preaches.
So imagine my dismay after applying many of Zeldman's and others' tips on good portable CSS as my poor little brain can absorb, I saw that Opera 6 for the Mac screws up my layout. Arrghh!
The problem boils down to Opera apparently ignoring a "right: 30px;" line in my CSS, moving a block of text that should be on the right over to the left. I've hit various CSS and Opera sites looking for a known bug and I don't see any signs of one. I've reduced the problem to a minimal test case. I've pored over the code a zillion times, hoping for a misplaced bracket or some other easy explanation, but no dice -- the page looks fine on the other browsers I have at hand and both the HTML and the CSS validate at the W3C.
So if any of you CSS hackers would care to take a look at my code and tell me who's crazy, me or Opera, I'd be much obliged.
Update: It's even worse in MSIE! Aaaaaah! More later...