Thursday, November 21

Today I worked on the design of my site while the students worked on the design of their’s. I decided to change the menu bar into a single dropdown, in order to facilitate the process of making the site fully responsive. I made a simple css-based dropdown menu, and discovered that I couldn’t get it to work.

I spent about four hours trying to solve what should not even have been a problem. Through painstaking trial and error I eventually discovered that the problem lay with another part of the css – a part that should have had no bearing on the menu at all. I fixed it but got left with a residual fear that I might only have fixed a symptom. Since the two elements should not have had any possibility of interfering with each other this might indicate that there is an underlying problem with the structure of the design: that some objects are siblings when they ought not to be related at all.

I now need to find the time to check the underlying structure of the site to make sure there is not something like a missing end tag causing the relationships to be other than what I intended.

Now I am on my way home, with no solution in sight. If, indeed there is a problem in the first place that needs solving. It is raining for the fourth day in a row, and I am watching the rain on the tram window.