Almost random thoughts I am afraid but one or two readers take an interest in the site history
and hunt out past Council scandals.
To that end the long term project to update this ancient website from its
pre-Smart phone
beginnings has been slowly progressing for five or six years. There are still some gaps in
2017 and 2018 but despite some broken links a selection of pages from those
years have recently
become more accessible. They were always there but only via the menus. Earlier years have been properly restored give or take the
occasional human error.
Some old features are near impossible to bring up to modern standards. They have been avoided on new pages, hence the once popular flipping picture pages have
not
been seen since 2016. Old ones have been made to work but they do not
scale up or down to suit the viewing screen size. The example given is a right
old mess on a vertical mobile screen. I can think of a way of fixing it but life
is too short to spend time on eight year old blogs.
The largest remaining problem is the many pages arranged in columns, They are likely to be a mess
when viewed on anything smaller than a laptop screen. Don’t look at the
Council Tax Rates on a mobile!
It really should be fixed but those pages are not actually columns, they are
vertically aligned rows. The important thing being that the tax rates must
always align with the relative borough. Fixed rows ensure that they do.
If the data was in columns and Hammersmith & Fulham folded into two rows because
of its length the tax rate wouldn’t follow suit and the whole thing would become a
nonsense. It’s a coding nightmare.
Sometimes aligning column contents horizontally is unimportant and
such pages
were fixed a while ago. The two column example linked will even expand into
into three columns if you have a big enough screen. Technically the addresses
shown are in a single list and the browser divides them up into equal sized columns.
There is no need to keep things horizontally aligned.
But once again that is not always what is required. A few ancient pages have
columns that are not divided into equal parts,
this one for example. It
was supposed to display as two distinct columns, one wider than the other but it didn’t work properly on a
mobile. It was modified to an acceptable compromise but it isn’t as originally planned.
So another technique has been developed and
a test page is here.
It allows two columns either of which can be as long as required and they will
remain independent of each other. It is very different under the bonnet to
anything that has gone before and requires your browser to learn a new trick
which it will do eventually. If you see rows of text your browser has not caught
up, If it you see two columns it has.
I doubt it can be adapted to suit
the Council Tax pages
but the search for a solution continues.