arkitrave :: log

Our phone number has changed! It is now 716.866.4499.

I’m enjoying the irony of this, two years after embracing web standards and abandoning table-based layout. I just used a transparent .gif image to get a site’s layout to work. Now, before you start composing the hate mail, let me explain.

I’m working on a set of templates for a web app. The content, of course, is user-determined, and can’t be allowed to break the layout. There is a sidebar, which may or may not be present, and I set up the divs to float to allow a footer to be positioned properly. A perfectly good way to do things, unless of course there is not content in the sidebar. Then, most browsers collapse the sidebar to nothing, and the float moves the main content div over to the left, which was unacceptable in this situation.

This doesn’t work. The following is what we actually want:

So, what’s the solution? The easiest one is min-height. Applying a height to the sidebar div will get browsers to render its entire width instead of collapsing it. That works in Mozilla browsers, and the new Safari which supports min-height.

min-height: 10px;

IE doesn’t support min-height, so it will collapse the div. This is easily fixed with the asterisk hack:

*height: 10px;

IE treats height as if it were min-height, so applying this selector won’t prevent the sidebar from growing with content. It will, however, ensure that there’s always some height on this box and keep the div from collapsing.

This is all great, but the web app is designed to be used on the Mac platform, and all versions of Safari should render the page correctly.

Since old Safari doesn’t render min-height, and isn’t going to fall for the IE * hack, what about generated content, which Safari can do?

Of course, we can’t put a character in the div, because it will render and be seen. And, putting ” ” in the content won’t work either; Safari still collapses the div. However, an image can be generated and placed into this div using CSS, and if it’s a 1px by 1px transparent image, nobody will be the wiser.

#div-in-question:after {
   content: url("clear.gif");
   }

So, there you have it. We’ve come full circle, and a transparent gif image helps a very nice, compliant browser to render a very nice, compliant layout. It shouldn’t affect anything else, because anything inside that div is a child, and will render right over the image, which is transparent anyway. In a year, when nobody’s using old Safari, it can come out of the CSS.

New York’s insane, archaic wine law has just been declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. In case you didn’t know, New York has the second-largest wine industry in the country, but has maintained a law prohibiting out-of-state wineries from direct-shipping to New York residents. Because of this law, other states will not allow New York wineries to ship their wines to out-of-NY customers. Given the upsurge in wine production from competitors such as Washington, New York could really benefit from the ability to expand their market to other states, and the small wineries in the Finger Lakes region are excited about this ruling.

It was a very mixed decision, 5-4 and not at all on the typical conservative/liberal split. The losers claimed that online interstate sales would increase consumption by minors. I don’t know about you, but online wine buying just doesn’t seem to fit the usual drinking profile (or budget) of America’s youth. UPS coming to Mom’s door during the day is just not as safe or cheap as finding a friend to buy 40s at the grocery store. The majority opinion agreed, and it isn’t everyday that Breyer and Scalia are on the same side of a decision!

Free trade should be obvious at this point in our country’s development, and laws that hamper the ability of small businesses to thrive should not be on the books.

As a lover of good wine and a fan of New York’s independent wineries, I’m glad to report that what New York’s overgrown assembly was unwilling to do, the Supreme Court did for them. It’s about time.

Along with several other models from the University at Buffalo, my work is going to be exhibited at Cannon Design’s atrium gallery in Grand Island. The model is of Renzo Piano’s Beyeler Foundation Museum in Basel, Switzerland. (His website is Flash sans URLs, so you’ll have to click “works” and then the picture that looks kind of like this model)

My model was also chosen for the postcard advertising the exhibit. The opening reception is Friday, 6 May, at 5:30pm at Cannon.