MySQL usage?

[smack]

Thanks Jelle -

I'll see what we can do. It's the age old problem of design vs. scalability.

Apparently we played around with !important tags, but since user CSS takes precedence, there's not much we can do, save for trying to make the whole design scale. That's tough. 

[jelle]

in this case it's design vs readability. Unless your site has much artistic value, i'd say that the design should not get in the way. It should help not hinder. But in this case it's just a small annoyance.
Did you fix the css menu statically in the menu or would a new toplevel also break things?

btw what is an !important tag?

[smack]

Well -

This moves the conversation into an entirely different realm, because we're straying into the realm of "brand," and I'd argue that design/brand is incredibly important. They've now determined that people make subconscious decisions about web sites in a split second, so you don't have much time to make an impression. Good design can help here.

While CSS allows for a large degree of scalability, it's not yet a perfect science, and support across all browsers is still spotty, particularly for CSS positioning. So we have to draw a line in the sand and support the largest portion of the audience while still maintaining the design integrity. The examples you posted, while not perfect, are fairly graceful degradations of the original intent. Yeah, the tabs wrap, but the rest of the design still looks pretty good.

Anyhow, thanks for the heads up, and for catalyzing this conversation in our office yet again. :^)

s.

oh, BTW, !important tags are CSS tools that allow you to specify that certain things in your style sheets should not be overridden. However, CSS 2.0 now specifies that a user's CSS preferences *always* take precedence over server style sheets, so it's of questionable use now:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cascade.h ... tant-rules