On Thu, 2003-09-11 at 15:33, tarquin wrote:
Yikes! I'd better get back to work on designs!
Mwooh-haa-haa-haaaaa! My evil plan for making other people work has come to fruition!
I've been looking around and it seems there is no solution to the problem of the page footer only occupying space beneath the article -- ie not filling the full width because of the quicklink bar.
The problem is that we cannot guarantee which of the two columns (article & quickbar) will always be the longest. All the CSS layouts I've seen that put a footer beneath columns require one to be longer than the other to do the "pushing down" of the footer -- and stub articles are often shorter than the quickbar.
Hmm, that shouldn't be necessary...
The simplest thing is to make the sidebar column a float, and give the footer a clear: both (see attached file for example). There are a couple problems with this, though: the sidebar has to come before the body in the source (which is bad for keyboard users & voice browsers). Also if you have a clear inside the body div, it seems to zip all the way down to the bottom of the sidebar. Bah!
Another possibility is to use Javascript to reposition the sidebar. (Ewwww!)
Or, of course, you could use a table. ;)
Anyway, I'm going to look at the skins I made with a critical eye -- comments on them would be welcome :)
Broadly speaking, I quite like Montparnasse. It's got the feel of what I liked from Cologne Blue, but things don't run together so much.
From a technical standpoint I have to say that right-handed sidebars are
more problematic than left-handed sidebars; oversized images, tables, or preformatted text can overflow into the sidebar, either under/over it or pushing it offscreen. Putting the default sidebar on the left may be cleaner.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)