tinkering again...

I'm banging around under the hood on this site, which is one among many reasons I haven't posted much lately (others include: having visitors, being visitors, and having to clean up our dump of an apartment in between having company and going away for the weekend and having company again).

I know this page doesn't render properly when it's viewed in a browser window that's not wide enough. Instead of giving a horizontal scroll bar, the right-hand column slides under the main column until it totally disappears (or, in the version of Firefox I'm using right now - version 1.5.0.7 - it just slides off the right edge of the screen, with no indication that it was ever there). The code (which I got from the BlueRobot Layout Reservoir) is designed to do that. I am trying to figure out whether that's the only way to get the correct stacking order of my page elements (main center column loads first, then the left menu column, then the right), because, as Bean has pointed out to me, a person could be stuck (say, at work) with a crappy old monitor with a screen resolution that's not big enough to accomodate the whole page. While a user with a small window on a higher-res screen could make the window bigger, a user with a lower-res screen can't make their window any larger. They'll never be able to see the hidden content without a scroll bar.

In my poking around on CSS discussion blogs, I seem to see a lot of comments which either imply or state outright that forcing a horizontal scroll bar on your page is a bad thing. I can't, at the moment, quite figure out why. But, if we accept that premise for the moment, then why have a layout that breaks by having some content overlap some other content? Why not have it break so the side content is forced further down the page if it doesn't fit beside the main content? Is that even something that could be implemented, given all the different ways code breaks in various browsers? The ultimate goal of site design is to have a site that degrades elegantly, so that even when bits of code can't render exactly as intended, all the content (the really important stuff) is still accessible. My site's not doing that now, and it bugs me.

I actually managed to force a horizontal scroll bar, somehow, at one point when I was first implementing this new template code last summer, but I changed the code when I realized that wasn't supposed to happen with this template (there's a comment in the code which explicitly states that a particular command "allows the content to overlap the right menu in narrow windows in good browsers"). Of course, now I can't remember why I thought it was a good idea to have my site break that way, nor, more importantly, can I remember what I did to force the scrolling. I feel like this whole process would be easier if I didn't have to work around Blogger's essential bits of code, but maybe I am just kidding myself about that. Is it too much to ask to have shit that just works? *sigh* Of course it is. I'm just so tired of messing with this.

But, while I'm messing with this, are there any other issues anyone's having with the site that you'd like me to look at? Please do leave me a comment...