Re-design, from the code up!

This site is a col­lec­tive mess, I’m active­ly doing some­thing about that. Things may get a lit­tle bumpy, as always, I wel­come com­ments and crit­i­cisms.

20 thoughts on “Re-design, from the code up!”

  1. You should post JPEGs of what the page looks like to you. It does­n’t look very good to me in Opera 5.11 (prob­a­bly the most stan­dards com­pli­ant brows­er out there) or IE5 (has prob­lems with its box mod­el).
    It occurs to me that the claim of look­ing much bet­ter in a stan­dards-com­pli­ant brows­er is pret­ty out­ra­geous. 🙂

  2. Inter­est­ing, you should only see the “look­ing much bet­ter in a stan­dards-com­pli­ant brows­er” com­ment if your using a brows­er that does­n’t sup­port style sheets…
    The prob­lem that there isn’t a sin­gle brows­er that tru­ly and com­plete­ly sup­ports the stan­dards is also a prob­lem, but I’m work­ing on the idea that we’ll get there one day and then sud­den­ly the web will shine.

  3. I am using a brows­er that sup­ports 100% CSS1 as far as I know, more than any­one else, just. The CTO of the com­pa­ny is the co-author of the CSS1&2 specs.
    You’ll note that con­for­mant UA’s may ignore the dis­play prop­er­ty.
    But any­way, I can’t see it today, and all looks right. If I turn off styling, it more or less looks like it did yes­ter­day. Did you tweak some­thing?
    Inci­den­tal­ly, it’s prob­a­bly awful­ly rude for me to write IE5 here, assum­ing IE5/Win.

  4. Oh yes, I for­got: beware.
    The CSS1 spec has errors and some of it is prob­lem­at­i­cal. The CSS2 spec con­flicts with it in some ways and has its own errors and ques­tion­able deci­sions.
    Don’t get me start­ed on some oth­er specs…
    It is not always easy to pre­dict what some­thing will do. Peo­ple post­ing com­plaints to brows­er lists about CSS sup­port more often than not have a mis­take in their code.
    In any case, CSS will not solve world hunger or fix up non-spark­ly web­pages. Some of the ugli­est pages I’ve ever seen were ful­ly stan­dards-com­pli­ant.

  5. Actu­al­ly I was mak­ing all sorts of changes to the struc­ture & lay­out at about the time that you made your com­ment on Mon­day night (ah, just noticed the US date for­mat… some­thing to fix lat­er), so if you were using a cached CSS page then things would have gone out the win­dow.
    Just a a side note, I do usu­al­ly use Opera to check that things look close to okay.
    I per­son­al­ly like the idea of sep­a­rat­ing struc­ture and lay­out into two dif­fer­ent things and using HTML for struc­ture only. When I get around to it I will actu­al­ly be adding sep­a­rate CSS files for dif­fer­ent brows­er types (bot­tom of the list, but one day).
    As for stan­dards, noth­ing is pre­fect, but if we don’t try then what’s the point? And yes, sim­ply fol­low­ing the stan­dards is not going to stop the ugly-as-sin pages from being writ­ten.

  6. Actu­al­ly, what is the point?
    (The sep­a­ra­tion of con­tent and pre­sen­ta­tion is semi-bogus as pre­sen­ta­tion car­ries seman­tic weight, etc.)

  7. The point is to com­mu­ni­cate (even if what you want to com­mu­ni­cate is that you don’t want to com­mu­ni­cate). It is the mes­sage that is impor­tant, not how it is pre­sent­ed. Yes, pre­sen­ta­tion can help, but if the mes­sage itself is lack­ing then even the best adver­tis­ing com­pa­ny isn’t going to be able to do much.
    If the ‘speak­er’ has to wor­ry about the pre­sen­ta­tion then that detracts from the effort that goes into ensur­ing the mes­sage has the intend­ed mean­ing.
    A writer is lit­tle con­cerned with the type­set­ting that will be used when his sto­ry is final­ly print­ed (well, not while he is writ­ing it any­way). Yet if we let web browsers ren­der as default the result is a mess that makes the design­er in all of us shud­der.
    We find our­selves in the curi­ous posi­tion of being author, edi­tor and design­er. It is hard enough doing just one of these jobs well, we might as well take advan­tage of trick that can ease the jobs.
    So if while writ­ing all that needs to be con­sid­ered is the struc­tur­al pur­pose of each ele­ment, (in html done with tags like h1, del, abbr, br, cite, tt, ol and oth­ers). Then the design­er can wor­ry about how to present all of these var­i­ous dif­fer­ent ele­ments in a way that best enhances the desired mes­sage.
    Well, that’s about how I’m see­ing it at the moment at least.

  8. This is why my page is plain. I’ve received numer­ous com­pli­ments about that. Well, com­par­a­tive­ly numer­ous.
    I’ll stop pes­ter­ing you now, I don’t think I’m being help­ful any more.

  9. I actu­al­ly like the design of your blog a lot, it is true that it is a sim­ple design, but sim­ple is nev­er a bad thing from a design point of view. Some of the biggest prob­lems when design­ing a lay­out is mak­ing things sim­pler.
    I don’t mind your pes­ter­ing, makes it look like some­one actu­al­ly read the crap I post here.

  10. I just enjoy read­ing the ban­ter between you guys. And the fun­ny stuff about roller skat­ing.

  11. Ban­ter??? Yes I sup­pose it is. Feel free to weigh-in (is that the right phrase?) any time Alan. Or per­haps you’d rather not hear what either one of us has to say on the sub­ject of frames…

  12. Oh, I hate frames. With a pas­sion. I also hate tables, for much the same rea­son. And javascript. And style sheets. And every­thing that is designed to dis­tract from the con­tent.
    But they sing to me… they seduce me. And so I make exten­sive use of frames, styles, javascript and serv­er-side includes on my site. But I try to ensure that the con­tent remains cen­tral, and the ‘design’ aspect serves to make that con­tent more acces­si­ble, while still feed­ing my urge to design and redesign.
    As an aside, at the last count, I was push­ing 1000 pages of con­tent on my site — but I only need to update a few dozen files to com­plete­ly change the look of the site. In terms of ‘style vs con­tent’, the con­tent has set­tled down, but I’m still inch­ing ner­vous­ly towards a long-term style.

  13. Alan, I actu­al­ly think that your site makes the best use of frames I’ve seen in a long, long time, per­haps even ever.
    And I’ll be adding a few serv­er-side includes just as soon as I fig­ure out how my ISP prefers them to be done. Good thing about the net, there is always a new toy to play with.

  17. The bug is for IE5/Win too. I’d also sus­pect IE4/Win, since they’re all the same code­base.
    There you go, that’s most of the world’s brows­er pop­u­la­tion for you. But how many peo­ple who vis­it this site use these browsers nor­mal­ly?

  18. I have been aware of this dis­play bug for awhile now, it is to do with an attempt to make the flash object com­ply with XHTML 1 Strict (no embed tag). Still mess­ing around with it.
    As for brows­er break­down, IE accounts for more that 60% of my view­ers, so I real­ly should do some­thing about it.
    For more detailed break­down have a look at my track­ing stats: http://cgi.zipworld.com.au/navaz/axs/ax-admin.pl

  20. Well I’ve fixed that lay­out glitch (as long as fixed means “removed the thing that was caus­ing the prob­lem”).

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