grr. something's missing

[ritaxis]

SO I thought the way to learn how to make a web page is the old fashioned way -- like any art student does -- copying the source and playing with it until I understood what was going on. And I found a nice simple three-column layout and I copied the source into my old Dreamweaver Ultradev 4 and all of the formatting disappeared. It's still in the source, but it sdoesn't show at all in the browser (what's worse is that I can't even get IE to open it. Mozilla opens it, Dreamweaver opens it, but it's unformatted.

Clearly I'm missing something. There's some little signal or other that should be obvious but it isn't to me, that tells the browser "hey, there's some formatting connected with this!"

On other fronts. still no word on any of the things that are out there. I should dash off another story so I'll have something else to put in the mail and never hear from anybody ever again about. It'll be a month at least before Afterwar is ready to send out into oblivion.

On still other fronts, for the second time in a week I was able to gather enough strawberries and blueberries that between them they could garnish a bowl of cottage cheese for the nice fellow. The grapes and apples, however, have a ways to go.

Comments

[beth-bernobich.livejournal.com]

Clearly I'm missing something.

You're missing the style sheet named "layout3.css", which should be located in the same directory as the source file, based on what I see in the HTML. Style sheets are where you define global styles (font, alignment, etc.) for the various HTML elements.

For a more coherent (and detailed) explanation of things CSS, HTML, et al, check out this web site (http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp).

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The web hates me tonight. I tried to post a response, and livejournal seemed to have deleted it. So then I had two copies. So I had to delete one.

SO. I've actually been trying to use the W3 site. I've gotten very confused trying to find what I need there and trying to apply it.

So I decided that what I need -- since there's only going to be one page with the style -- is an internal style sheet. That's what it seemed to be called. And this is what it looks like now. Okay, but there's an image of a bicycle chain that's supposed to repeat down the left side where the gray border between the blocks is now. And I've tried six ways from Sunday to get that in there, and I can't do it. I can get the code for the image to appear on the page, but I can't get the image to appear on the page.

basically, I found this, which is supposed to go in the body, apparently:

{
background-image:url;
background-repeat:y;
background-position:160px0px;
}



But that didn't work when I substituted the url, and it didn't work when I did url(http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis/bellachain/bellachain.jpg) either.

Foo. I hope this posts this time. I'm tired of it.

[lavenderbard.livejournal.com]

I always put my stylesheets in a seperate document, because I want to use the same stylesheet for an entire site.

You should be able to stack those up, by the way and just say
{background: url(http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis/bellachain/bellachain.jpg) repeat-y 160px 0px}

Looking at that I'm wondering if your problem isn't that you didn't leave a space between your position elements?

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

What you are missing, too, is that different browsers display pages differently.

I had a shock the other day looking at livejournal on a PC - that's not *at all* how I'm used to the layout. iCab, my browser of choice, doesn't like them at all, so all I could see on your example page was three columns, one beneath the other, as promised, content before menus.

There's no solution for that. I'm still in favour of tables - they might not be as elegant, but they display better. (I've seen IE/Windows choke on styles before, too, so it's not just me)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I haven't got so far as different browsers. That's a whole other problem. Just now I'm trying to get it to show in IE which is what I have (I have Mozilla too but I hate it). So I'm followin instructions that are supposed to be for IE. I've never heard of iCab. What is it?