Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

The style switcher seems to be working fine now, though there’s an odd delay loading the first styled page over slow links in certain browsers. Perhaps it has something to do with browser support for preferred stylesheets. In my fruitless investigation of the issue, I learned that the technical meaning of a preferred stylesheet is one with a LINK rel=”stylesheet” statement that also has a title attribute. If you have rel=”stylesheet” but no title, the stylesheet becomes persistent, which means that style in that file should apply to all the alternates as well. I’m not claiming it works - this is all rumor, hearsay and specifications.

I finally got around to adding switchable style to the search templates. (There’s a search box partway down the menu on the main page, if you want to try it out.) The two search templates can be found in a folder called =search_templates= at the same level as the MoveableType cgi scripts. You have to edit them in a text editor, since they’re not accessible through the MT interface in this version (2.5). You can import a template module into the search templates, but if you run more than one blog through the same MT installation, you might want to look at the manual before trying to use modules.

Some browsers (which is to say, Chimera) didn’t run my styleswitcher’s onload function in TrackBack popups, presumably because there was an onload attribute in the BODY tag of the TrackBack popup to seize the focus. I figured that was less important than supporting Chimera users, so I took it out, but it probably wouldn’t bother most people if it were left in.

I’ve stumbled across some nice MT stylesheets now that I’m on the lookout for them. Tapestry use a stylesheet for the archives, while the main page adds table layout. There’s no reason the main page couldn’t be done with CSS, also. The colors, while somewhat web-unsafe, are lovely.

Moveable Blog is clean, clear, and a great resource for MT users. My first TrackBack experiment will be pinging that blog from my first Moveable Style entry. Look for it over there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 16th, 2002 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.