Alcohol, Networks and Dodgy Tables
Well, nothing particularly interesting has been happening of late, aside from some bizarre freak allergy which has left all the skin around my eyes full of broken blood vessels. Unfortunately, I may never know what caused it, as last night (when it happened) was the night I decided to sample as many different types of real ale that my local has to offer. I learnt two things, the first being that London Pride is not all that great, and the second is that it's extremely difficult to diagnose network problems after knocking back a few! The obvious hangover that ensued this morning was not the most welcome thing in the world, and left me with a headache which lasted all day. Finding myself short on pain killers, and being too lazy to buy some, I decided just to top myself up with copious amounts of fluids. This was going well for a while, until a burst pipe in the street meant that all toilets were out of action for a good few hours whilst it was being repaired.
The journey home was not entirely great either. Not once, but twice, did I find myself having to detour around people who'd decided to stop and stand on the wrong side of the escalator; one woman was actually sorting out her handbag! And another girl decided that she was going to cause a big queue at the top of the escalator as she couldn't quite decide if she wanted to get on it or not, despite it being one of two which both went the same way, and that way in fact being the only way to go. It's a wonder these people can dress themselves in the morning, Piccadilly Circus Station is not the hardest in the world to navigate.
Work today, however, was far more fruitful, and I saw my way clear to finishing a template for a new site. This task was slowed somewhat by the ever helpful Internet "I want to do things my way" Explorer. Some simple table layouts (normally I would go entirely div based, but I was on a schedule) failed to work correctly in IE, but rendered perfectly in Firefox. I think I know see why some websites are a mess of nested tables. IE gets confused at anything remotely resembling complexity, so bunches of smaller, more digestible tables are nested, which perversely IE has no trouble with whatsoever. As an experiment I tried to set up a simple (or so I thought) table in Dreamweaver (normally I use Notepad++), as I was sure IE should have rendered it. What I did find was a peculiar bug in Dreamweaver with tables where rowspans overlap. As an experiment, try to create the following table in Dreamweaver using the WYSIWYG interface. For some reason, it seems to totally scrap a row when you finish the final merging of cells. Strangely, colspans do not have the same effect, or at least, I didn't find this to be the case.
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