Eric Bohlman wrote:
[color=blue]
> Let me guess: you stared at your stylesheet for hours and actually saw
> offset specifications even though you had dropped them.[/color]
I don't know whether I actually "saw" them, it simply didn't even occur
to me at all that they might not be there (especially not since IE and
Opera put the box where I wanted it anyway, even without offset specs).
This was way too easy... so I assumed completely different reasons. :)
Kinda like checking the electronic of your car when the problems is a
lack of fuel.
[color=blue]
> Welcome to
> "psychological set," the mind's ability to see what it's expecting to see
> rather than what the senses actually perceive. Douglas Adams based his
> concept of the "SEP (Someone Else's Problem) field" on psychological set.
> Anyone who's ever debugged a program or proofread a manuscript has had the
> experience of staring at their work and seeing what they meant to write
> rather than what they actually did write. Gerald Weinberg had much to say
> about psychological set in his classic _The Psychology of Computer
> Programming_; as an example, he pointed out that any programming who names
> a variable "ST0P" (yes, that's a zero) is setting himself up for failure.
>
> Psychological set is actually a consequence of the way our brains try to
> minimize the demands on our attention mechanism (it's no accident that we
> speak of "paying" attention; attention is a scarce resource in our brains'
> "economy"). It's what's called a "heuristic"; a process that gives the
> correct results *most* of the time, but sometimes fails. It relieves us
> from the need to consciously attend to all the minute details of everyday
> life, but it leads to mistakes in the (relatively small) class of human
> endeavors that require extreme precision. It explains why, for example,
> someone else who looks at your code (and doesn't fully know what you
> intended to write) can instantly spot errors that you can't.
>
> Psychological set is one of the reasons why it's so important to use
> validators (though in your case, a validator couldn't have caught your
> mistake). A validator, being a mechanical process with a level of
> "intelligence" that could easily be beat by a moderately retarded five-
> year-old, doesn't make any assumptions; it just literally follows a bunch
> of simple rules. And therefore it's too stupid to experience psychological
> set, which means that it will catch a lot of common mistakes.[/color]
Good ol' Doug... why did he have to go so young...
But indeed, I already had checked the (shortened) stylesheet via
validator and it was perfectly happy with it. Nope, it said. No
problems. Keep goin', chap! Box here, box there, looks good to me either
way. Next problem? Validators lack taste.
--
Nicolai Zwar --
http://www.nicolaizwar.com
"I don't post off-topic digests. I consistently ask the antagonists
what their postings have to do with classical music, which happens to be
the topic of this newsgroup."
(Dr. David J. Tholen, Astronomer, in his "Antagonists Digest, Volume
2452972, posted in rec.music.classical)
Netscape/Mozilla, Divs and Margins 
