andilinks — Thu, 22 Aug 2002 17:21:51 +0000

Suzanne, I do appreciate your help.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I am reassessing the goals and the focus of my website. Most of my Google visitors only view one page and never return. But it does not bother me that the majority of the visitors that arrive from Google take one look, throw up their hands and say "Oh this is too complex for me." In fact I like it that there is a self-selection process and that only a very few actually understand how to extract value from my site.

Sites like mine do not make money, so I don't want to be a bandwidth subsidy for a lot of lost searchers. I do want to provide a service for a select few who understand what I am doing. There is a small but growing group of regular visitors to my site. I want to serve that group better and build a community of like minded persons. I don't ever want to run ads or sell-out my inclusion process as Yahoo! and others have. And since there is no workable revenue model for a site like mine I want to self-screen my visitors as I mentioned above and I want to refine that selection process. This is helped by the added control offered by CSS. I did in fact say early in this thread that I wanted to use CSS entirely and stop using tables.

So to sum up, I want to make my site easier to use, but not **too** easy. I want to narrow the scope to better serve just a few enlightened regular visitors, not the mobs of searchers that arrive from Google--though it is from this group that I most often find my new regulars.

I also realize that my site needs a lot more work in order to meet that goal and other less well formed goals.

Andrea

Suzanne — Wed, 21 Aug 2002 22:08:41 +0000

Andi, you misunderstood me. Really.

But I do think that it would be advantageous to you to reconsider how you are presenting your information. I was speaking specifically of the areas where you *do* have a big paragraph of uninterrupted links.

That aside, let me introduce you to

is a blocklevel element, similar to paragraph or table. It contains things. Using child selectors, you can do a similiar thing with div as I suggested above with span. To do that, you wouldn't use classes (or not alone) but id.

This is why I really suggest you take some time to learn what CSS is about -- you keep approaching it as if CSS cannot help you, but it can, and very much so. You just can't see it because it requires a different perspective on coding. I say that because that is true for EVERYONE -- at first, it doesn't make any sense, it seems counter-productive when you can simply add font tags and other work-arounds.

I'm sorry you took offense, it wasn't meant to sound frustrated, so much as to cut through the speculation and show you that there are underlying issues -- the structure and layout of your page -- that are affecting your ability to implement and understand the advantages of CSS.

I hope this information is helpful, I really do,

Suzanne

andilinks — Wed, 21 Aug 2002 07:42:50 +0000

Quote: I find your site too complicated to even look at...

Obviously you didn't. I don't have "a big line of uninterupted links" (except in just a few categories), which is why what you are saying won't work for me.

It doesn't take a high level of sophistication to understand my site but it is true that some people don't "get it." Fortunately I don't have to cater to a mass market. I can tell that I've worn your patience thin so I won't bother you any longer, thank you for the time and help that you did provide.

Andi

Suzanne — Wed, 21 Aug 2002 06:38:09 +0000

Look, it's not as hard as you want to make it.

span.whatever a { padding-left; 3px; padding-right: 3px;}

This says all tags that are children of this particular span tag (all tags in the tag) will have that applied, no others will.

You should also consider how you're putting the site together (I know you are) because a big line of uninterupted links (except by spaces) is not very easy to figure out. I find your site too complicated to even look at, with all the links and how they are presented.

But even if you change the presentation, you may find that using CSS will make your life easier.

In the future, you can set that rule to word-spacing instead of a child selector and padding.

It's really a good idea if you look over the resources and try to get a good understanding of how CSS works, then you can apply that knowledge to your current design while working on a new one if you wish.

Suzanne

Abhishek Reddy — Tue, 20 Aug 2002 15:21:44 +0000

Filesize may increase, but you'd at least be separating content from presentation.

Then again, you say you will redo the whole thing... maybe by then word-spacing will be better supported.

Good luck.

andilinks — Tue, 20 Aug 2002 15:19:17 +0000

ahhh...

Configured this way, works. But it uses 25 characters to effect what 2 characters do using underscores of the same color as the background. Considering that I have several hundred links on each page, using the deprecated tag seems the better solution. Again, thanks for your effort.

Andi

Abhishek Reddy — Tue, 20 Aug 2002 15:06:31 +0000

What I mean in the second suggestion is that wrapped around each individual link is a span.

Beaucoup
dmoz.org
Yahoo!

Try using the padding-left/right code with that.

I know the third idea just defeats the purpose... it was just a thought.

andilinks — Tue, 20 Aug 2002 14:03:51 +0000

"word-spacing : 6px;".
works well, unfortunately only 43% of my visitors currently use IE6 (which is greater than I expected, but still too low considering other browsers would see no space at all between links).

I don't understand the second suggestion, I do have the entire HTML links enclosed within .

The third suggestion may work, but the tags take up more characters than just 3 non-breaking spaces "& n b s p ;" would...

Thanks for your effort.

Andi

Abhishek Reddy — Tue, 20 Aug 2002 13:49:03 +0000

I guess another way to do it would be to something like this:

span.data { letter-spacing : 3px; }

about.com
& nbsp;
Beaucoup
& nbsp;
dmoz.org
& nbsp;
Yahoo!

Abhishek Reddy — Tue, 20 Aug 2002 13:40:15 +0000

According to TopStyle, what you want is "word-spacing : 6px;".

But it's IE6-only.

Also, padding only happens where the tag begins or ends. So what you get is space to the left of and space to the right of . Try applying the class to the 's as well. I'm not entirely certain of that, though.