ZenLinux Blog

The demo site now has the goal editor, which took a lot longer than I thought it would to get done. I can’t believe I went this long without looking up whether PHP had here documents; this makes the teduious HTML generation a tad less painful (so I don’t have to escape every set of quotes).

I haven’t done much cross-browser testing lately but as of now it looks like Safari on OS X handles things fine in addition to Firefox. I suppose by the time this thing is really ready for prime time, IE 7 might even be out. :-/

I’ve taken to creating some static, non-dynamically generated HTML pages to mock-up the goal editor interface, and have been struggling a lot with where to place the “Link to goal/value” drop-down selector. In the end, I actually decided to change the abstraction a bit and allow a goal to be linked to another goal (short-term links to longer-term) AND a Governing Value. After all, there is no reason to limit you to one or the other, now that I’ve thought about it.

Anyway, now that I’ve got something that doesn’t inspire the gag reflex upon looking at it, I’m having a fun time generating this layout dynamically from PHP. Using HTML tables for layout sucks, but CSS support is too sketchy between browsers for positioning. I am deeply grateful for Firefox’s Web Developer Extension, which can outline table cells/borders on the fly. If I didn’t have that, I’d probably have given up by now.