A Little CSS Curious.

Tutorials: I just need to know ONE thing.

I had heard many a great thing about CSS: You change one thing on a .css file and it changes on every page linked to it. It allows much greater control over just about everything. The biggest selling point to me was being able to get the look of Bob and Tom, Max PC, Bunny and Ravy, Bob and George, and so on and so forth.

I had been able to emulate the look with tables. Tables can be extremely difficult, sloppy, non-transferable, and I have even read that they block search engines. When working with tables to try to place everything in its proper place is frustrating. Adjusting cell height and widths, making, deleting, combining, splitting cells. Inserting images of the same background as placeholders. Then bits of formatting show up at random causing huge amounts of empty space or forcing objects outside the table. On the rare occasion I get one looking right I copy and paste it to a new page and hell breaks lose. All the formatting I spent hours getting right is gone. On top of that, I read in a tutorial that information contained within a table cannot be indexed. A little Google search of Rosenkreuzstilette proves this. The only two articles appearing in the top 150 are the ones that have no formatting what-so-ever. You have to get around to 200 to find one that is formatted with tables. Admittedly I doubt there's anybody that can remain interested or even awake all the way through Article Two. Much much less the other three.

Apparently CSS can solve all my problems, or some guy in Nigeria tells me. First thing I do is download web pages that look good to me and pick them apart to learn how's it done. I start with Bob and Tom and open it up in my editor and boy does it look nothing like how it's displayed in a browser. I do this to a few more sites and each one doesn't help. So I start Googling CSS Tutorials.
My frustration with online tutorials goes back to learning how to make flash videos. Of course I wanted to use sprites, but I couldn't find one that told me how. All the tutorials would tell me how to draw with the tools in the Flash Toolbox. How do I import sprite sheets and use them. Can't be all that hard. It's all over Newgrounds. (Yes, I did download that page as well.) Then after months of searching I found one. The results are my usual fare.

Most CSS Tutorials start out with "Here's how to do background color, and now here's you do foreground color." Not mentioning that foreground is also called font. I understand starting off with the basics and working up. After a dozen or so sites that tell how to do background colors, I need more. When we do go indork, it's all about navigation, divs, images scroll or not to scroll. Good to know, but what I need to know is how to get the look of a table but with CSS.

I was smart enough to pay attention to the parts of the tutorials that talked about linked style sheets and inline styles. So I go back to Bob and Tom's page and open up the CSS file. I really didn't get much of it, but, when I opened up the actual web page and looked at the code I knew where to look. First I had to find the section that was formatted the way I wanted, then look at the code. It was linked to a section marked "container." I copy and pasted that code to a new file and a new web page and it turned up just the way I wanted.

I have since implemented this style as I go along. All the pages in Season 2011 will be formatted the same way. I still have problems with copy and paste, formatting mysteriously appears for no reason screwing everything. I'm not going to go back over every page to implant my new knowledge. They look good enough as is and nobody really bothers with the archive anyway. Maybe someday when I feel this overwhelming urge that my my life can go no further unless I do this: I may fix Season 20 and get it looking the way I really wanted.

One thing I did do: I looked up CSS Container code to make sure it wasn't just for Bob and Tom. I don't need the Friggemall Lawyers coming down around my ears for stealing their lines of code. But hey, why would they care about some obnoxious blogger and his very much unknown sprite comic hidden in the deepest, darkest, dankest, dorkest corners of the internet?