One thing about PHP is that it can get pretty complicated. CSS can get complicated enough on its own, with one class referencing any element on the page, pointing here and there. But when you combine the two… you’ve got something pointing to something which points to something that’s pointing at a thing which references anything you choose. See how crazy this stuff can get?
What I’ve been doing the past couple of days is turning my CSS files into dynamic style sheets, renaming them with .php extensions and serving them up, after preprocessing, as CSS. Doing this allows me to use a thing called a sniffer which looks at the User Agent string browsers send when doing HTTP requests to servers, which allows me to see to what I’m delivering content, $Browser on $Platform (e.g., Safari browser on Mac OS X), so that I can send either PNG images or GIFs. The only real reason for doing this is just because PNGs can be semi-transparent, except that all but the very latest Internet Explorer beta have serious problems reading semi-transparency (called “alpha” transparency).
This is something of a specialty of mine. For those who know me online, my old site was one of the first wave of sites to use semi-transparent backgrounds.
Like I said, this is complicated stuff. So now I’ve got a sniffer going “if $browser equals ‘IE’ on Win, set $imgExt to ‘.gif’, otherwise set $imgExt to ‘.png'”. And then I’m making a PNG and a GIF for every background that I want to see through. Meanwhile, all three subthemes have got several places where they reference $imgFileXX.$imgExt for different backgrounds.
So I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, referencing this variable to get to that variable to get to an image file to put in an element. Up until this very moment, I was doing all this without a particularly coherent strategy. That changes. Now. Because I only just now realized that I had been rearranging things trying to come up with reasonable alternative GIF images to send to Infernal Exploiter versions less than 7, and I’ve turned around at noticed that I have left one hell of a wreck in my wake. I now have way too many unused background images (failed experiments), and have tossed the variables standing in for the filenames like so much salad, resulting in a chaotic mess for all the good browsers out there who actually know how to deal with PNG images!
Guess you’d have to be there.
So tomorrow, I’m going to sit and think and make a god damned chart, so I can have a set pattern across all subthemes (e.g., Image5 is for alternate comments, Image10 is for the post background).
As they say, hindsight is 20/20.
Oh, btw, I’ve named the first three subthemes “Leather” (brown and tan spaceship interior), “Saturn” (white, black, and dark teal; very clean and high-contrast), and “transmothra 3.0” (black, smoky indigo, and blue) (this last being a bit of an homage to the final version of my very nicely done old site, thankyouverymuch).
Now that I’ve said all that… it’s probably going to be another week before this thing is actually ready enough to be unveiled. It’ll be worth the wait, I promise.
Sigh.
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