librarian trading cards in intro to xml

[deborah]

For an XML class I'm teaching to library and technology staff tomorrow, I've written a tiny XML trading card template. I'm not going over the XSLT and CSS in class -- this is an XML-only class -- but in theory they could be used as teaching tools as well. (They're both non-standard, though; the CSS because of its absolute positioning throughout and the XSLT for its simplicity.)

Anyway, I'm creative commons licensing the files and posting them for anyone else who'd like to use them. Oh, and here's my sample card.

The files.

Comments

[cavlec.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with absolute positioning?

[deborah]

there's nothing wrong with absolute positioning in theory, except that it's not flexible at all. If a user with limited vision increased the font size on my librarian trading cards, the absolute positioning wouldn't shift any of the boxes, and words would become hidden beneath the next section of the trading card. If you use relative positioning and floats, then the various boxes lined up regardless of the user's screen size and font size settings. In this case, the strength of the absolute positioning is that I'm not trying to make something that can be easily resized -- I'm trying to exactly reproduce the physical-world concept of a 2.5x3.5 trading card. But that's not what most web design is for.

[cavlec.livejournal.com]

Oh, I get you. :) I've just never managed to get relative positioning to work right -- I tend to use a combination of absolute (for sidebars) and plain ol' static. Something there is in my brain that does not grok position:relative...