strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive

Adventures with an unreliable narrator.

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Jul 17 03: call for CSS help

Anybody with a knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets—or who knows somebody with a knowledge of CSS—is hereby asked for help. Specifically, why does the <DIV> in which this text appears not display a margin-bottom of 18px? There should be an 18-pixel black band between the bottom of the white box and the bottom of the page. I would swear I had this working once, but I had to recreate the stylesheet a while back (don’t ask) and it certainly isn’t working now. If you need to read the html, you might wish to use my resume instead, as the code is much less convoluted and the problem affects all pages on the site. Feel free to examine the stylesheet itself as well. The problem is browser-independent, although I’ve only tested it on Macs.

I think other other sites use tricks like this. Why can’t I? What the hell is going on?

Commentary

The Internet is a beautiful thing. I put a similar call out on the Straight Dope Message Board—and within 36 hours I had a fix ready to go. I still don’t understand why I had to resort to this rather kludgy fix (I turned the <DIV> into two separate nested ones, one containing the placement information and one containing the margin information) rather than it just working the way it was sposta, but there it is. Other avenues were investigated by a number of people. In the end, this is the one that worked.

Many thanks to Achernar, aka Christoper Pilman, a 22-year-old Ph.D candidate in astrophysics at Harvard, whom I’ve never met but who spent a little time and came up with the answer.

posted by Andrew, Jul 19 03 10:37 PM

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