February, 10, 2003 archives

once upon a time, i played a lot of games. one of the reasons i switched was to be on a more mainstream platform so i could play games again. warcraft iii is my first all-new game in a long while. i've only played through the tutorial levels, but so far, so good. i'm keeping my eye out for civilization iii at a good price. i wish there was a mac os x version of sid meier's alpha centauri, though.

i'm toying around with a new design. i'm realizing that i'm pretty hopeless when it comes to putting together a set of colors that hangs together well. i guess that's why they teach courses in color theory.

this is really an variation of css rendering bug #717 from mark's list of safari bugs, but safari has a bug that prevents enclosed elements from inheriting the background color of their enclosing element. (at least: i haven't tried with an image.) here's an example which also shows how to work around the problem. (just adding a top-level i { background: inherit; } rule is also enough.)

in fact, adding a * { background: inherit; } rule fixes the problem, too. i wonder what the possible negative side-effects of that rule would be.

update: here's an even better explanation and test of the problem.

another update: the v60 version of safari, released february 12, does not fix this bug.

jeffrey zeldman's note on rules-based design is timely. one of the things i'm doing in my redesign is paring down the <div> fluff, and this note reminded me of the parts of the css selector universe that i haven't really explored.

just to make things interesting for myself, i'm trying to go for absolutely minimal markup. no unnecessary style rules. no unnecessary elements. no unnecessary attributes. forms are a challenge.