My one little adjustment to the alignment of text in paragraphs ended up ballooning into something far more extensive than I’d ever originally intended – but all to the good.

In addition to the recently mentioned changes to my personal site, I expanded them out to the Inferno Enterprises site as well.

The main changes are that blocks of text now appear on a grey background (just like they have with my journal entries for a while now) – rather than the text sitting “nakedly” on top of the background image. It’s not quite as stylistic – bit it’s more legible, which is important.

I’ve also removed all instances of the JavaScript I’d been forced to use (before I knew how to do it differently) that had got IE to “lock” the navigation buttons along the top right and top left of the pages in place. (Since IE doesn’t follow standards and always needs workarounds…) Since the pages themselves no longer scroll, only text boxes inside the pages, there’s no longer any need for this as the buttons won’t even be tempted to go anywhere any more.

Along with these visible changes were some backend code changes – most noticeably the fact that I added more stylesheets for common layout presentation. Now it’s much easier for me to adjust everything in just one place.

The only thing I can’t quite figure out is the bottom “padding” for my grey background boxes (with text inside). Even though I’ve defined bottom padding, it’s not actually applying it. (For some reason, the more padding I specify the greater the height of the box becomes – which makes little sense.) On the main page of my personal site (and a few other pages here and there) I’ve “faked” it by adding an artificial “spacer” to make it appear as if there’s proper padding. But on most of the pages I didn’t bother with this. It has something to do with the way that I’m defining fixed percentage box heights – but it’s not significant enough of an issue for me to really investigate at the moment. Assuming I ever have any free time again, and nothing better to do, I may try to solve the mystery. (I can do it easily enough by adding an extra “box” inside the grey background box that has its own padding – but that would mean reworking some things and, although it would work, it wouldn’t actually tell me why it’s not working as it is…)

Later: Yes, I’ll go with the additional “invisible” box, even though I’m not sure why I have to.