The Official Web Site of James R. Cummins III

Issues


The stylesheet switching was really very simple. The one obstacle was the navOver() and navOut() functions. The color selection was hard-coded in the functions and now I needed a way to get the background color from the TopWrapper to use for the mouse over. It should have been simple, but you know that it wasn't, or I wouldn't be writing about it. I suppose that I should not be surprised that there are still discrepancies in the way that different browsers support document objects, properties, attributes and methods. In any case, I tried using someone else's JavaScript to get style attributes by id. Except that it didn't work with Netscape 7 or Opera. So I had to add support for getComputedStyle to get it to work with NS7. But it still doesn't work with Opera. Going to the Opera web site was a frustrating waste of time. Documentation is still, shall we say, spartan. So I finally got the answer from Peter-Paul Koch, who has devoted more time than is reasonable to chasing down issues with JavaScript and DOM compatibility. And a good thing I looked there since Opera 7 simply can't do what I want.

Column Resizing


You may notice that the left and right columns change width when selecting a different font size. This is to help maintain approximately the same text flow.

Your favorites


Not completely thrilled with my choices? Feel free to send me your favorite three color codes and I'll make up a stylesheet just for you.

Changing Site Appearance With Stylesheets


Since I have taken great care to keep this site HTML 4.0 and CSS compliant, it seems appropriate to begin to use the functionality that provides. For now I am focusing on appearance, with some minor layout considerations. The intent is to allow the site visitor to customize certain aspects of the layout and presentation to improve the usability of site.
Use this form to set your display options:

Color theme:

 

Font size:

 

Font typeface:

 

  

Current Settings= Color: default Font size: default Font typeface: default