New YW.Com rollout

[Peter Murray]

(Second thoughts: those dropdowns may have been "cloned" from a slightly different version of the menu: might be only a few keystrokes' difference. If you have the time/inclination, can you give me a list of all the ones that come down in back of the container? No rush about this.)

Looking at stylesheets is fun. I notice that on the AboutTheAuthor page, the container's background is set to 0.90 opacity (and the menus dropdown behind it), while on the site map page, the container has background:transparent - is that anything to do with it?

[noonstorm]

Hey Lee,
I love the new roll out. It's so manageable. I'm appreciating all your hard work in taking us yet another step farther. I guess I am included in that 6% still using ME(only one I have ). When I was set at 800x600/high color 16bit, I saw the strips in detail but has since changed to 1024x768/true color 24bits and my banner has smoothed out the color to a more truer blend. Still see slight lines but very vaguely. A great improvement from previous.
Using AOL 9.0
1024x768/24bit

[Selden]

A quibble:

The page http://www.youngwizards.com/AboutOurMakeover.html
says
"The YoungWizards.com and YoungWizards.net websites are now more than two years old."
but it doesn't say when "now" is. There's no obvious way to tell if the page was written a day ago or a year ago. (Well, there are hints in some of the comments on the page, but they're not very explicit.)

[Nathan]

Originally posted by Lee Enfield-Burke:
Nathan, thanks, I really appreciate this.

You're quite welcome! I've done a small bit of webmastering for various pages (though nothing this large or complex) and know how many things can go wrong with even a simple page, especially as regards cross-browser compatibility.

First, as my above comment may have suggested, the dropdown menus behave correctly in Opera 7.54 on ME, which is why I thought that they had been fixed. Following Peter's investigations, I examined the CSS and performed a few experiments, the upshot of which was that the "filter:alpha(opacity=...)" setting for the container is causing the dropdown problem. I must also note that this problem afflicts the main YW.com page (i.e., http://www.youngwizards.com/), as I just noticed today. In addition, Opera does not appear to interpret the setting in question in the same manner as does Safari (i.e., the container on the front page is white in Opera and blue in Safari), which possibly explains the browser dependence of the dropdown problem.

I don't know if there's any more material coming, and I'm hesitant to bug her because she is apparently nose-deep in Romulans at the moment.

That's quite all right. It's not a particularly pressing matter, and I would hate to extricate her prematurely from her Romulan immersion.

Argh. Is anyone still _using_ ME???

While I have heard all sorts of horror stories about ME from various people, it works like a charm for me, and provides all my Windows needs on my dual boot Linux/Windows system, so I have seen no need to upgrade to XP. (The XP and OS X systems I mentioned above are ones I have access to while at school.)

As Selden brought up a picky point, I shall as well: The macro-divisions in the sitemap are currently links that lead back to the sitemap page (with the exception of the very first link to YW.com). Are these going to link to a separate page eventually? If not, then they seem a bit misleading.

Nathan

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

First, as my above comment may have suggested, the dropdown menus behave correctly in Opera 7.54 on ME, which is why I thought that they had been fixed. Following Peter's investigations, I examined the CSS and performed a few experiments, the upshot of which was that the "filter:alpha(opacity=...)" setting for the container is causing the dropdown problem. I must also note that this problem afflicts the main YW.com page (i.e., http://www.youngwizards.com/), as I just noticed today. In addition, Opera does not appear to interpret the setting in question in the same manner as does Safari (i.e., the container on the front page is white in Opera and blue in Safari), which possibly explains the browser dependence of the dropdown problem.

Gaah. Okay, out goes the variable opacity. It's a shame -- I kind of liked it. But browser support seems to be too spotty.

While I have heard all sorts of horror stories about ME from various people, it works like a charm for me...

You're fortunate. I had it for a while and it drove me nuts: it was incredibly unstable on my machine.

As Selden brought up a picky point, I shall as well: The macro-divisions in the sitemap are currently links that lead back to the sitemap page (with the exception of the very first link to YW.com). Are these going to link to a separate page eventually? If not, then they seem a bit misleading.

I'm trying to get rid of them, but when I simply remove the hyperlinks, the dropdowns refuse to function. It's something to do with the way the Java is structured, I'm betting, and unfortunately I'm clueless as to Java. If anyone finds a way to keep the present menu unchanged except for getting rid of those top-level links, I'd love to hear about it.

[Nathan]

Lee: While I'm sure you don't want to hear this, there are still a few items to bear in mind as you "tidy up the last few items" on YW.com:

First, the variable opacity is still in place on the "About the Author" page and DD's bibliography / filmography. Also, the link to the "Friends, Enemies and Others" page from the "Introduction to the Characters" page is broken due to an extraneous comma in the URL. For a very minor matter, the "About our Clock" link does not appear in the "YoungWizards.com" dropdown menu on the "Site News" page.

Regarding the links in the sitemap and the dropdown menus, the dropdown menu still works in Opera if I simply remove the code that turns each dropdown menu heading into a link, so perhaps this problem is browser-dependent (though I may have simply misunderstood you). Indeed, in IE 5.5 (the version I still have 'kicking around' on ME) the dropdowns appear to the right-hand side of the heading instead of below it when the hyperlinks have been removed (though they function normally in other respects).

Nathan

[Peter Murray]

I found the same thing as Nathan, only using Safari 1.2.4 - the menu still works without the # hyperlinks.

*belated check* Ditto for the Mac versions of Firefox 0.8 and Camino 0.8b. iCab 2.9.8 makes it look like a complete mess anyway, so don't ask about it .

[Artemis Wolfang]

By the way, the link to YW.Com from YW.Net doesn't work.

[Gryphon]

Lee, I saw the intro page (and the new banner!), and it looks great! There are lines in the color, but they're so subtle you'd never notice.



^^ Screen shot of it on Internet Explorer on a Windows XP. The center bit isn't as centered as the picture shows (if that's your goal); I cropped off a little bit of the background on the right.

[Zgirl]

I love the new banner on YW.net. The letters that say Young Wizards are so pretty, they look liquid like almost...

[T-wiz]

I dont see any stripes.
It looks great!

[Peter Murray]

This one is more about the content than the style/HTML/CSS.

On the W@W page, it says "Wizards at War will be published by Harcourt Trade Publishers in July, 2005." However, Harcourt's own site says October. I'd like it to be July, obviously, but does the page need updating?

[Nathan]

Here are a few further content notes, some quite picky, as well as an HTML/CSS/browser compatibility issue:

1. There is an unsightly incomplete paragraph end tag (i.e., "/P>") on the YW.Com Site News page http://www.youngwizards.com/SiteNews.html.

2. Part of the YW.Com Discussion Forums page http://www.youngwizards.com/YWDiscussionForums.html (viz., "...please use the 'discussion forums' link in the right-hand column to register at the Forums log-in page.") looks like it was intended for YW.Net, which does has a navigation column on the right-hand side, though it doesn't seem to have ended up there. In addition, the "About our clock" link is absent from the "YoungWizards.com" dropdown menu on this page.

3. The acute and umlaut in 'Elthäthté'/'Eltháthtë' trade places between the page for that entry http://www.youngwizards.com/Errantry...Elthathte.html and the contents page http://www.youngwizards.com/Errantry...tentsPage.html of the Errantry Concordance.

4. In Safari, only the "I" is an active link in the "Interactive fan fiction: The 'Wizards on Call' project" link on the navigation column on YW.Net. (The entire text is active in IE.) The disparity in interpretations seems to stem from a disagreement about whether "<a>" and "<span>" commute, as the entire text appears as a link in Safari if the order of those tags is changed to that of the other links in the navigation column (i.e., "<span>" inside of "<a>").

5. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for the varying capitalization of the 'Com' and 'Net' parts of "YW.Com"/"YoungWizards.Com", etc. among the text, graphics and title of the websites (particularly the YW.Net Intro Page http://www.youngwizards.net/IntroPage.html and the YW.Com Makeover page http://www.youngwizards.com/AboutOurMakeover.html--the text of the analogous YW.Net page appears to be identical). For that matter, are there any conventions regarding capitalization of URLs and their derivatives?

Nathan

I run Firefox 1.0 on Mandrakelinux 10.0 with 800x600 resolution and 16 million colors (24 bits) and the graphics card ATI 3D Xpression and everything seems to be working fine...

Exept your clock requiers the plugin "Java Runtime Enviroment" and I'm having troubble getting it, but I don't think that's your problem.

[edit]
Hold on! Some pages have a blue background, blue banner, and blue-on-gray taskbar (e.g. Wizards on Call), but some (e.g. The Books: So You Want to be a Wizard) have a gray image, gray background, and a blue-on-light-blue taskbar. Also, on the forum, it says everyone has "0 posts".

[Peter Murray]

the Old Downside page in the Errantry Concordance displays as blank in Safari 1.2.4, but shows up Ok in Firefox 0.8 (both under Mac OS X 10.3.8). I can't see why, though - I tried saving that page and S'reee's page and using diff to compare them, but I can't see any relevant differences, only content.