July travels

As I mentioned recently, we've been doing a lot of travelling in anticipation of our return to Canada. I've just updated our Travels in the UK website with our July excursions, which include Windsor Castle, Cliveden near Maidenhead, Stonehenge, Iron Bridge, and Moseley Old Hall. We visited so many places in August that it will be sometime before we get around to documenting them all. No doubt we'll have plenty of time for such reminiscences once the whole family is reunited in Montreal.

Change in the air

The nights have a chill to them, as do the mornings. Autumn is on its way in the Midlands. Other changes are afoot: part of the family has departed England for Canada, in anticipation of school which begins next week. The house is quiet, empty and sure to grow emptier still. Packing is well underway. Unwanted furniture and clothing are piled up by the door, on the way to friends or the local charity shop. It's only a matter of weeks now before the movers arrive and our lives change irrevocably...yet again.

Summer hols

I've just submitted my final assignment for an online course dedicated to CSS 2.1, a style sheet language intended to be used on the web to format and structure documents which builds on previous versions of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS 1 and CSS 2). If you're running Internet Explorer on your machine, most advanced CSS 2.1 selectors will escape you (with the possible exception of early releases of IE7, which I haven't yet checked out).

Our final assignment was to style a document along the lines of the css Zen Garden. We were asked to take an html document devoid of styles and create a stylesheet for it without altering the original web document. My version is located here and the design notes here. I've tested the page in four different modern browsers but have yet to hear how it fares in older ones and on non-Windows operating systems. Any comments are welcome.

Yet another World Heritage Site

We've been doing a lot of travelling lately. In the past few weeks we've visited Windsor, Stonehenge, Oxford, including Kelmscott Manor and Buscot Park, both high on the list of Pre-Raphaelite must-see historic homes, as well as Ashby de la Zouch and Calke Abbey in Derbyshire. Here is a photo from Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, the bridge itself marking in 1779 the first structural use of cast iron.