Confessions Of A Berson Mind

You know, if my feet weren’t so friggin big, I swear I’d hobble along with at least one foot in my mouth at all times.

Here’s the thing about padding: Yes, it’s the tool of the devil.  Yes, I still believe that.  But now, I have to admit, that there is a time and place where it is completely appropriate and using margins only will not cut it.  *slap*

For the latest Rev of www.berson3.com, I chose a simple, news-esque site layout that’s clean and very nice to maintain.  It’s more Web 2.0 than previous designs…but still not that watered-down.  I’ve learned now that establishing CSS for FF 2.0 first is not the smartest thing to do…seeing as how the majority of users will be using Internet Explorer.  So, I bite the bullet, and I code with my eye on IE7.  Apparently, that’s still not the smartest thing to do.  I created my design, completely confident that it looked sparkling in IE7, it must look great in FF2, right?  Nope.  As it turns out, when it comes to backgrounds of container divs, if you don’t set heights, widths,  and the sort of those container divs…then the truly web standards compliant browser will assume you don’t want the container div to overlap to areas you actually do want it to.

Example: look at the homepage for berson3.com.  At the top, you will notice a thin strip of grey background in IE7…but in FF2, it’s black (if I haven’t fixed the CSS file yet, maybe I’ll post some pics).  Why?  Well, the grey area is actually a div called “all” and the masthead is called “titlebar”.  I created titlebar with a margin-top of 10px, while giving the all (the top element on the page) a margin-top of 0.  IE7 says, ok, start “all” at pixel 0, and start titlebar at pixel 10.  FF2 says, start titlebar at pixel 10, yes, but since there is no content in “all” before the “titlebar”, it actually starts the div down at pixel 10 with “titlebar”.  Ugh.

Padding was the solution.  By setting the margin-top of both divs to 0, and then giving the the “all” div a padding of 10px 0, it bumped the “all” div to the top where it should be, and the titlebar down 10px.  Live and learn I suppose.  I will continue to avoid padding as much as possible, but now, even I have to admit…it has a purpose and right to be in the CSS Spec.

Is it just me, or is YouTube on of the greatest inventions this decade?  I mean certainly, DVR/PVRs have made life a lot more entertaining with being able to manage your viewing content.  Hell, they created the term “viewing content.”  But, with something like YouTube, as long as the content provider is willing to play ball, a user community is supplying the entire world with pretty much whatever they’d like to see…whenever they want to see it.  How can you not love instant gratification?

Take for instance, an evening where a buddy and I were watching a hilarious show on TV.  Shows over, now what?  We’re still cracking up over stuff we had seen a few minutes earlier, and don’t really want to stop laughing.  We could play cards or Wii….but we want to laugh!  In walks YouTube, and we’re able to watch the 8 more episodes that night.  Or, like today, I wanted to watch the latest episode of High Stakes Poker…but couldn’t.  Damn DVR jumbled up the file, and I ended recording like…20 minutes of it.  YouTube’s got it locked down, with the entire episode ready to view online.  How can you not love it???

Plus, it has things like subscriptions, and a great tagging system to accompany it.  I subscribed to the dude who posted the High Stakes Poker clips…so now I can automatically find them later if I want…and, I also subscribed to every clip tagged with “Negreanu.”  So, if there’s ever a lack of good poker on TV…I check my subscriptions, and voila!  I don’t even have to search.

I don’t rave often…but how did we get by without this before?

Good?  Bad?  Comment please.