Archive: March 13th, 2003

Here’s a handy tip from Jeffrey Zeldman, prompted by a question asked at the “CSS: Between the (Style) Sheets” panel that he co-hosted at SXSW: how to preload hover states in CSS rollovers.

This is just what I needed to add the finishing touch to my recent XHTML/CSS conversion of Lost In Translation.

I was really happy with the way that I had the site navigation links looking but the CSS rollovers were causing an annoying flicker in Internet Explorer 5+ on Windows. References to images in a stylesheet evidently don’t get cached by the browser.

Now, thanks to Jeffrey’s tip and the addition of one extra line to my stylesheet, that problem is solved.

Want some more real-world CSS tips’n’tricks? Check out Doug Bowman’s great article “Using Background-Image to Replace Text”.

You may remember that on my birthday I mentioned that I received of the soundtrack to the movie Avalon.

It was a gift from Jessica and it wasn’t easy for her to get hold of it. She had to get an import from the French Amazon.

Trying to get hold of the movie itself is even harder. I could order a German or French DVD but there are no English subtitles provided. An English, European region DVD of Avalon doesn’t exist.

So when I was offered the chance to get the film in Divx format, I hardly considered it piracy. Hey, I’m still willing to pay good money for a DVD of the film.

There was only one snag. Quicktime doesn’t get along too well with the Divx format. There are some notorious sound glitches.

Some googling revealed that the generally accepted way to get Divx movies to play nice with Quicktime involves some complicated .avi to .mov conversion.

So I was very pleased indeed when I discovered VLC, a new multimedia player for the Mac. So new, in fact, that it was released on the very same day that I was given Avalon in Divx.

Now that’s what I call a timely product release.

In case you’re wondering, the movie itself is pretty darn excellent. A stylish mixture of video games and eastern European grittiness mixed with a nice slice of existentalism wrapped up in sepia tones and choral music… right up my street.