Though round-edged boxes and columns that go all the way down do require disappointingly complicated CSS (using little images makes it feel like cheating) I’ve actually managed to build most of my new design much faster than I’d expected. There are some glitches (notably the right column’s currently below everything else and the corners of the boxes on the left need blue backgrounds) and there’s plenty not in there yet, but it’ll be sitting over here at maybe.html while I work at it. Right now I’m tearing out my hair at that right column. If I absolute position it it breaks the left column going all the way down thing which depends on floats, and a 1 pixel high image repeating down the left in a container box that all the way around the whole layout and also needs a footer. Update: A position:absolute worked beautifully now. I suppose I changed some other detail. CSS is cool except that when you change one little thing everything else quite easily goes wonky. Usually because you forgot to close a comment or something ridiculously simple.

I guess it’s fair that I suffer, though, since my poor students are going through the same stuff.