'grass' theme

I got tired of my previous website theme, so I created a new one. And thanks to the miracles of CSS, I didn't have to throw out the old—there's still a 'choose your layout' option in the menu.

Playing with CSS is fun, and this was an ideal opportunity to learn the new features of CSS3. I've used some of those, and did so in such a way that the theme should still be usable under a browser that doesn't speak CSS3 yet (I hope, though I didn't test). I'm calling it the 'grass' theme—if you go check it out, you'll see why—and it's now the default.

While I was at it, I found out about this little features of CSS that I didn't know about earlier, but could be useful none the less:

Using background: inherit is not the same as background: transparent. The latter will render all elements on the site (including floating elements) on top of eachother, while the former will inherit the background of parent elements, but will 'hide' elements that have a lower z-index value on the same location. This is useful if you have position:fixed or position: absolute elements that might overlap with floating elements on small screens.

I'm sure this is old hat to anyone who's done some serious web development (me, serious web development? hah!), but it's news to me.

One thing I haven't found is whether it's possible to use an alpha layer using CSS3. I looked for quite a while and didn't find it, so I suppose the answer is that it can't be done, and you'll have to use a PNG file with alpha values, or some such. Oh well.

In other news, . But I guess that's not a surprise to anyone. Leaving by car, in three days. That might be a surprise. Still have to pack a shitload of things, and also find some things. No surprise there—nothing better for me to do something than an uncomfortably close deadline. Oh well.