I don’t know if I’ve got a bug or if I’m doing something terribly wrong.
I’ve got a page (link included here) with quite a few layers and rollovers. It’s all working fine but now I can’t move anything. If I do, every white ‘item’ box in the LH sidebar is crossed grey and all my content disappears. If I quit without saving and re-open everything sort of returns to normal but I still can’t move anything. I’ve just spent all day building this page and haven’t finished yet. But if I try to move anything now it just locks down.
I need more help.
because I was having trouble keeping the footer at the bottom of the page. This is why everything is inside the background.
What seems to have happened is that I made one move too many and it sent all my content into some kind of parallel universe where it can’t be accessed any more. Perhaps it’s punishment for getting involved in Freeway without knowing what I’m doing.
Any other suggestions would be great. It’s very, very frustrating to have spent so long on something only to have to redo it all again. And this isn’t the first time this nasty lock-down has happened to me. I want to find out what it is so that I can avoid it in future.
Catherine
To see what is going on, try clicking on the top bar of the left-hand pane in Freeway, where it says Site. When you click, it should change to Page. When it does, expand the tree of the page (click the disclosure triangle left of the page name) if needed, and look at the hierarchical list of all the page contents.
I am guessing that you are trying to move an element that is inline within another element, and an inline layout cannot be modified in this manner. You must use padding or margin to change the offset of an inline element from its peers or parent. You can easily get the element out of “jail” by selecting it in the left-hand list, cutting to the clipboard, then click on the pasteboard somewhere blank and finally paste. Then you should be able to maneuver that element in the normal manner, through click and drag.
Walter
On Sep 28, 2014, at 11:38 AM, cjl email@hidden wrote:
I don’t know if I’ve got a bug or if I’m doing something terribly wrong.
I’ve got a page (link included here) with quite a few layers and rollovers. It’s all working fine but now I can’t move anything. If I do, every white ‘item’ box in the LH sidebar is crossed grey and all my content disappears. If I quit without saving and re-open everything sort of returns to normal but I still can’t move anything. I’ve just spent all day building this page and haven’t finished yet. But if I try to move anything now it just locks down.
I need more help.
Thanks, Walter. I created a new page and then pasted elements into it and it seems to be OK.
So was it not a good idea to do the box-model thing? I thought it allowed me to work on different sections of the page and keep them all nice and separate, but it might not have worked out in the end.
The serious reason to use an inline layout is to make sure that changes to your content (either from a CMS, or just from someone setting their browser to 48px fonts) does not screw up your layout by running it through the layer equivalent of a Cuisinart.
It’s actually how most hand-coded pages get built, because it is seriously bulletproof. But generally, when you start out to build such a site, you make design decisions early on that will forever color how your page gets constructed, and those changes are relatively difficult to back out of later. I tend to do my sketching in layer mode, and not worry about the way it will be built eventually. Then once the layout (as if you were using markers and tracing paper) is approved, then you go back and build it over from scratch to look like your layout, but act like an unbreakable and flexible Web page.
Walter
On Sep 28, 2014, at 3:22 PM, cjl email@hidden wrote:
Thanks, Walter. I created a new page and then pasted elements into it and it seems to be OK.
So was it not a good idea to do the box-model thing? I thought it allowed me to work on different sections of the page and keep them all nice and separate, but it might not have worked out in the end.
To be clear, I’m saying that it’s really hard to do free-form design using inline construction. That said, it is extremely hard to do bulletproof design with absolute positioning. Tradeoffs on both sides means you choose the tool you need for the job at hand.
Making a layout and convincing a client that it is the right way to present their content is one job, but you need to then take that layout into the real Web — the one with a zillion different browsers, several different major OS brands, and thousands of minor versions, all with their own unique way of looking at a standard page. And then you also get to meet Beverly, who has advanced wet macular degeneration, and has her Web pages read to her out loud by a creaky old piece of software named (I kid you not) Jaws. Which emulates a browser last popular when Windows 95 stalked the landscape.
Walter
On Sep 28, 2014, at 4:25 PM, cjl email@hidden wrote: