Wednesday, March 27, 2002
I woke up at 3:30 A.M. today, couldn't get back to sleep. At work today I put in code on our development site that makes 3.0 and lower browsers get a stripped-down version of the page. Not strictly text only, but considerably more accessible than our standard pages. So far I've done this for the homepage and 1-column templates. By the end of the day I should have the entire site's templates redone. I can't wait—this is great to force those older browser users to stripped-down pages. The standard pages looked quite ugly because the older browsers don't do stylesheets and didn't handle tables as well. Today we have a project review meeting for the School of Pharmacy project that went live on March 15. It was probably the most enjoyable project I've worked on. I worked with people who knew what they were doing and were passionate about making things as right as could be. After the meeting, Susie had a Web team luncheon planned as a small celebration of our project's success. It turned out to be more of a banquet than a luncheon. The Dean's conference room table was covered in white tablecloth, a purple flower arrangement about the size of a loaf of bread, and full service silverware and china for a 3-course meal: assorted rolls with butter and a green salad with bleu cheese, Morroccan chicken with rice pilaf and chutney, and 2-layer lemon cake with lemon frosting, all served by a courteous gentleman dressed like a waiter in a fine restaurant. Joining the party: Julie Bernstein, Susie Levings, Carol Fox, Bob Ignoffo, Mary Anne Koda-Kimble, Martha Fitzgerald, Alex Kerr, Andy Evangelista, and Cindy Watchmaker. We celebrated our successful Web site in style; Julie kept saying how she wasn't accustomed to the royal treatment. We talked of plans for our Web site as well as how frustrating Web-related subcommittees are at UCSF. Most of the afternoon I spent in InDesign 2.0 putting together a special version of the 2002-2003 academic calendar at Cindy's request. I had been anxious to try out the new table features in InDesign 2.0. They turned out to be remarkably superb. It took a little learning how things worked, but after about 30 minutes I got the hang of it. It took a very long time for me to figure out how to change the width of a table—the online help was no help in finding the answer to this. (The answer is: Select the Text tool, then hover your cursor over the right edge of the table. When it turns into a different cursor with arrows pointing left and right, click and drag to change the width of the table.) However, I still haven't figured out how to do this numerically, which seems odd to me because you can control everything else imaginable numerically. Also, I wish they put all the table border settings in a single dialog, and I wish they had table styles. Copying table formatting became very tedious very quickly. Patrick made yellow curry chicken for dinner.