.: A small font hack for Safari/IE compatibility. 06/07/2004 :.

I spent last night working out some kinks behind the scenes. There was previously a small bug with the preview function, so there were times when sentences were chopped together (and read wrong) on the month's index page. I believe I have eradicated that problem completely now. I also spent sometime today cleaning up some CSS bugs under windows, and finding a font that allows the page to render *almost* as well in Internet Explorer as it does in Safari. This is no easy task. Many of the stock fonts look terrible under IE, and conversely, the fonts that looked descent on windows didn't look as good as the defaults on the Macintosh. I found a compromise, or a small hack that looks like this:

font: 8pt/16pt lucida;
font-family: "Courier New", Verdana, sans-serif ;
font-size: 8pt;

Originally, on the Macintosh, I had the font defined as "font: 8pt/16pt lucida;" - which looks great under Safari, but looks a bit funky under IE. So I played around until I found a font setting on IE that looked similar (albeit not as good) to the font rendering under Safari; this setting represents the second two lines above. Then I began playing to see if I could I find something that would work for both. The hack shown above renders the same under IE as if the first "font" line were not present. It has the added benefit to changing the rendering on the Macintosh slightly - pushing it more toward the original choice with just the first font tag by itself while looking better than only having the last two lines (at least for my taste and the layout).

Finally, Yahoo! indexed my site again and the search field is working now. It worked briefly when I first turned it on, but apparently if you change the custom results template any you have to wait for the site to be reindexed before the results work correctly again - which I found strange.

Yeah, about that... Maryna's Safari browser renders the page in a nasty kind of Courier font (per the second tag), so forget everything I said about the font hack... I emptied my cache and I'm still getting the nice looking Lucida font while Maryna's is still rendering in Courier. I'll try to figure that out. But at least it does look better on windows.

Yeah, and the search field is broke again. That is the most finicky CGI script I've ever seen. I wonder if any update to the site causes it to stop working correctly ?? Wow, that would suck. I would just switch to Google, but I compared the results, and Yahoo's were better (and they should be since they host my site).