So in the course of trying to redesign the site and update my article archives, I realized that my Web design skills were quite cutting edge for the time I learned HTML… around 1997. Which means I got to spend a bunch of the weekend teaching myself some CSS/DHTML/Java. So maybe someone geekier than I can explain: Why on earth isn’t there a native implementation of a function to get page elements by class or swap classes? As far as I can tell, it’s actually easier to just swap stylesheets for a page than it is to either just globally redefine or substitute particular classes, which seems terribly kludgy if all you want to do is tweak some property for all members of a specific class or classes when some event fires. But it’s both an obviously useful thing to do, and damn tricky to figure out how to do yourself if you’re not proficient in Java. (I eventually just found a widget someone else had written to do the same thing.) Is there some easier way to do it that I’m just not aware of?
Anyway, all that notwithstanding, I did manage to get it to do what I wanted to do finally, and my articles & essays archive page is finally functional and pretty much up to date.
4 responses so far ↓
1 theCoach // May 15, 2006 at 10:40 am
Julian,
Welcome to wonderful world of Web Development.
There are, unfortuantely, a lot of camps out there right now, and nothing really works as well as it should.
There are, certainly Browser specific at least, ways of swapping class styles, but I have been removed from creating cross browser html pages for long enough that I am not sure of the state right now. Post exactly what it is you want to do, and also include the browsers that you want it to run on.
Do you mean Java or Javascript? They are very different things. It sounds like you are talking about Javascript.
There are some things coming out right now that may be of interest — but they are all beta. Atlas from Microsoft offers some AJAX tools for cross-browser development. This enables other common javascript functionality that you may be interested in as well.
Also, Yahoo released (beta I think) a javascript developer package that you may find interesting.
There are other packages as well, but I know nothing about them. You also may be interested in http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/, a free Web development tool from Microsoft, that probably offers good javascript editing.
Good luck!
2 jordan // May 16, 2006 at 7:53 am
However you managed it, I dig the new look.
3 Julian Elson // May 16, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Personally, I prefer the old look. I think it’s that the purple and magenta just are too jarring for me.
4 bago // May 17, 2006 at 6:35 am
As long as they aren’t read only you should be able to hit them through the DOM.