We recently fixed and improved on our Faculty Schedules pages. Somehow, the CSS file for the site was deleted during the 2005-2006 school year, making the page harder to read and use.
We’ve added new CSS and javascript to the site, including a box on the right that keeps track of people you’ve selected to overlay and makes the form easy to submit. The nifty thing is, we were able to avoid a visually jerky and semantically questionable javascript solution for the box’s placement, and implement the placement completely with CSS, despite the fact that Internet Explorer (pre-7 beta 2) doesn’t support the position:fixed CSS declaration.
We based our solution on work by Mark Wilton-Jones, as described at http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/fixedPosition.html. This hack/work-around isolates a couple different versions of Internet Explorer and feeds them appropriate CSS fixes (some of which is proprietary Microsoft stuff, which ends up invalidating our CSS, but it seems like a decent compromise).
We also recoded the HTML of the directory-esque information to conform to the hCard microformat. hCard attempts to encode vCard information in XHTML by giving specific classes to elements containing certain data. We’ll be trying to use this technology (along with the hCalendar microformat) in more places around the Gustavus site.
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