MTAmazon
Aug 24, 2002 | Q

I’m now using the MTAmazon plugin to provide the “currently reading” information over there in the sidebar. It’s neat — all I have to do is put Amazon’s ASIN for the book I’m reading into a file, and the plugin generates the HTML with the cover image, title, and author using Amazon’s XML data. I’m aware that this isn’t nearly as cool a use of the new XML programming interface as something like Amazon Light, but it’s useful to me, and that’s sorta the point of the user-accessible interfaces, isn’t it?

Comments

Jason, fyi, your right column is showing up on the left, underneath your content on IE 5.1.4 on my Mac.

• Posted by: Jeff on Aug 25, 2002, 9:52 AM

It does the same thing on my IE/Mac, unless I open up the browser window to a width larger than I normally use. The problem appears to be that the content area and the sidebar area both have a fixed minimum width, so if there isn’t enough room for both, the sidebar has to drop down to the bottom.

• Posted by: Dori on Aug 25, 2002, 5:23 PM

The only thing that has a fixed absolute width is the righthand bar — 135 px. The lefthand content section is just supposed to be 70% of the page. I guess that makes the entire page 450 pixels, which I don’t think is too terribly wide… I dunno, though.

• Posted by: Jason on Aug 25, 2002, 5:35 PM

After a little playing around, I found that IE/Mac requires the browser window to be at least 797 pixels wide before it will display the sidebar on the side.

Why? I have no idea.

Oddly enough, if I narrow the page down to say, 350 pixels, it still doesn’t display a horizontal scroll bar.

• Posted by: Dori on Aug 25, 2002, 10:12 PM

Perhaps you should make the right column also a percentage, rather than fixed.

• Posted by: Jeff on Aug 26, 2002, 10:46 AM

Except there are some things in the righthand column — like the 135-pixed header graphic — that will enforce the minimum width just by their size, so there’s not a whole lot I can do about that.

Dori, would you mind sending me a few screenshots at varying widths? I want to understand what the screen looks like when the page is 450 pixels wide, and at varying larger sizes. It really doesn’t make sense to me that IE/Mac wants the page to be 800 pixels wide before it will fit 135 pixels into 30% of that width (240 pixels!). Strange as hell.

• Posted by: Jason on Aug 26, 2002, 8:37 PM

I just sent you off about half a dozen. If you have any trouble with them, let me know.

• Posted by: Dori on Aug 27, 2002, 5:46 PM
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