So, it's 4:30 in the morning and I'm wide awake listening to Radio Paradise. Great music. Dreadful hour. My back hurts. My brain is fried. All is not lost for I have chocolate.

Ya know, I've never really liked keyboard shelves under the desk. But I'm beginning to think that the cause of my back pain has been from leaning to type. This started about the time I replaced my desk. (And nearly killed myself crawling around on the floor running wires behind the desk.) Bad posture may be aggravating things since I spend like 16 hours a day typing. So, yesterday I installed the keyboard shelf that came with my desk. I think it has made a big difference. Still some aching but nothing like it has been. And it seems to be slowly improving. I guess I'll know after a few days.

Visitors

In other news, I was visited briefly by a very pregnant Mantis:

Shapeshifting Forms

I keep running into major annoyances when writing complex web forms. The appearance is always ugly and varies wildly based on browser and operating system. It's a real problem in situations where you need the form to look precisely one way no matter how it is viewed. So, I've been contemplating writing a comprehensive javascript class which allows you to customize a form so it looks consistent across all operating systems and browsers.

Most importantly, this wouldn't require any changes to the way you create a form. You could take an existing form and simply attach the class initializer to the window.onload event. The form is created using perfectly normal HTML. The class rewrites the appearance of the form using javascript to manipulate CSS and HTML. There are numerous disconnected examples of this already. I modified an existing example of a form select for my proof of concept HTML form themes. It's really pretty ugly at the moment. But it's given me some confidence that a class library is feasible.

Less importantly, HTML forms look horrible on paper. So I'd also like to have a print function which takes the editable form from the web page, reformats it and makes a nice printed document. This is something that comes up more often than you'd think. Often people will print a form just before they submit it so they have their own record.

Labels: life the universe and everything