v-g Backpacking in Britain Blog

Alright, people have hinted long enough about my persistence with imperial units in the trip and route stats. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that hills and mountains lose something when expressed in metres and it’s not just that the numbers are smaller, it’s something intangible but of a curious appeal when thinking about them. Distances in kilometres don’t convey much to me either in raw form, fortunately I can do an instant mental calculation to get a mileage that means something.

Anyway, after a painstaking period of furious editing I’ve updated every trip report page with metric stats. There are still a few other pages with miles only, I’ll get around to updating those soon.

The next job was to install Internet Explorer 8 and test the site. IE8 is far more standards compliant than its predecessors (hooray at last), but it did require a change to my ‘browser-sniffing’ code to get the font size acceptable:- basically, IE always displays fonts bigger than other browsers and I have to load a different web style to cope with it.

There is one problem though, and it’s not the fault of IE (believe it or not):- it’s the display of OS maps for the trip reports. I use OS OpenSpace, which does not work in IE8 when the browser is operating in ’standards mode’ which is the default. The OS have known about this problem with OpenSpace for a while now but still haven’t fixed it.

In the meantime, to display the OS maps in IE8 you must first tell IE to display the trip report page in ‘Compatibility Mode’, then the OS map should work. You do this by clicking the Compatibility button in IE as indicated by the arrow in this screenshot. It does change the font size back though, so when the map window has opened successfully, you can go back to the report page and turn off Compatibility mode by clicking the button again to restore the font size.

Phew, enough of that, I’m off tomorrow for a good backpack despite the thick heavy humid air!.