Kludgy code & silent evolution

sound interesting, eh? Interesting enough to keep you reading at 5:30pm on a Friday before a long, Memorial Day weekend? I hate to say it since I'm sitting here writing it, but get a life! no, seriously, enjoy your holiday - and as for the fun in reading this post - I make no promises...

I'm working on a table in FrontPage 2003. Yes, I work most quickly in FP, goodness help me. But seriously, FP2003 is not a bad product - mostly keeps the code clean nowadays (plus offers a lot of helpful things not in some of its competitors... though I do keep a copy of the chief competitor to use for the couple of things that it's better for)... but... I realized partway through that I wanted have the contents of the cells centered. So I hit the center button to align them. I preview when said table is done (http://www.cslib.org/publicrecords/Connservator) in IE, great... post it, then do the Firefox check (was trying to move too quickly, hence the order, anyhow...) and see that the rows don't have consistent heights.

To make a long story short, FP defaulted to the paragraph level tag to make that center alignment happen, so it entered the p align="center" tag after the td (and, of course, didn't close it before the /td). I dunno why it wouldn't assume to apply it to the existing container - there was no p before, why not attach the alignment to the td, but whatever... Once I cleaned said code, table rows looked good in both browsers.

Another reason html is your friend...

As for the evolution, you can see where we're headed in our move from http://www.cslib.org/opra.htm to http://www.cslib.org/publicrecords.
Granted, you shouldn't notice much visible to the eye - the progression from one web structure to another is designed to be almost seamless (here, I'm talking about a reorganization of the Public Records Department's pages). But it will be helpful on many fronts. It allows me to offer certain key members of the department access to modifying their own section of the website.

My philosophy on improving technology has generally been to get the "under the hood" stuff in order before moving onto the flashy paint job. Though the paint job is being prepped in my abundant spare time. Really.