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December 2000
I've discovered a little technique which really
enhances the look of a page. It's a smooth corner,
which gets rid of the sharp edges that are produced
when a column uses a background colour. Here are
two of the corners I've produced for left and
right columns, respectively (see December 2000
for there usage):
 
You can see that they are half transparent, and
half coloured the same colour as the column (##FFFF99,
which is a WWW-safe yellow colour).
The other little trick that I've learnt is to
smooth the edges of the end of a row. A good example
of this is at the top of my home page. It did
this with a curved corner which is white on the
top right-hand side, and transparent on the bottom
left-hand side:
Thus, as the background is white, it looks as
if there is a smooth corner at the end.
Oh I also found out why some pages are so difficult
to re-format, it's typically because the were
produced from Microsoft Word, which adds lots
of <span> and </span> statements.
If possible, delete them as the embed formating
information, which is difficult to modify. I use
the menu option Clean Up HTML (which the span
defined as the tag I wish to delete) to get rid
of these tags.
In the left-hand column I've included a few examples
of opacity, which also helps to add interest to
a graphic. I've included an example on one of
my essay pages:
Compressing a sport's
result
It is always a good idea to try to vary the background
opacity, as this will allow you to judge the optimal
value. In the case of the example of the left-hand
column, it is likely that 25% opacity gives the
best results, as the background image can just
be seen. In the 10% version the background image
almost disappears.
An even clearer trick is to export to a transparent
GIF file. As the opaque graphic will blend into
the background color.
Unfortunately, as you can see,
the image has not properly applied the transparency,
as there as still non-transparent colors around
the edges of the graphic. Thus an improved method
is to use a background canvas with the required
color. This gives a much smoother image:
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