Beauty in code
3 Apr. 2008
Apparently, CSS can actually make me weep with joy.
I'm working from home today and waiting for an eternal virus scan to end before logging into the company VPN (yes, I'm a nerd and actually do this step....deal with it), so I decided to kill 0.5 seconds by looking at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Cherry Blossom map. The map isn't perfect - namely, I hate that the little info bubbles stay in place even when you move away from a particular tree, preventing you from activating other trees that are underneath the bubble. Even so, I really like it and am impressed by it every time I obsessively reload the page to see whether it's been updated yet or not. It's simple, beautiful, easy to use. So, suddenly overwhelmed with curiosity about how they get the map like that, I looked at their source code and realized they do the entire layout with nothing but CSS. There's a little javascript for the popup tool-tip, but the actual map itself is entirely CSS. Holy crap. That is some loving, painstaking work, and proof that you don't need the latest code fad to accomplish a beautiful interface!
6 Apr. 2008 3:43 pm
Did you know that Wordpress is CSS adverse. Totally screws up my Onion article posts. And I am not enough of a programming geek to fully understand this problem. I suck as bad as the CAPTCHA you use.
6 Apr. 2008 4:12 pm
It's not Wordpress screwing up the onion, it's whoever created the particular template you're using.
And, for the record, every time you fill out that captcha, you help digitize the world's knowledge, making accessible to academics and rural schoolchildren everywhere. So cry me a river.
18 Apr. 2008 8:11 pm
Speaking of recaptcha, I'm testing it out with this comment. Doesn't seem to want to play pretty with my recently upgraded wordpress.
Test test test.