Redesign

Feast your eyes, hungry readers. I’ve blown a few hours that I shouldn’t have redoing this site. The page you see now uses nothing but CSS for layout–no tables, except for the calendar (which is tabular by nature). I still need to re-do some of the static pages, and I may want to rejigger the structure and the appearance a touch, but I’m pretty happy with it. Let me know what you think (if you care).

Although he probably doesn’t know if, I am in debt to Derek Powazek, from whose page I lifted an extremely obscure, but apparently critical modification. Technical details follow:

I had attempted to use XHTML for my page in the past, but was having a hard time getting the date to line up on the left of the main text. There are some positioning tricks you can use to get it to look right, but those depend on knowing the height of the left-hand slab in advance, which is inelegant at the least. In turns out that by switching to HTML 4.01 Transitional, the float: left/float: left trick would work. If anyone can explain why this makes a difference (and if there’s a way to make the trick work in XHTML), I’d love to hear it.

3 thoughts on “Redesign”

  1. Adam, I don’t think that your blog is displaying as intended yet.

    On Windows Mozilla, the calendar and recent entry list appear below the blog entries, and the right-hand column is empty.

    On Windows-IE there are two text columns, with a big gap in the middle of the right column. The calendar and recent-entries list appear below on the left column.

    I suspect these are not the effects you meant to create.

    – Adina

  2. Adina–I’m seeing a similar problem in Mac-IE. I think I can fix it with a little kludging.

    The problem you see in Mozilla may go away if you widen the window a little–that should allow the text to reflow. I’ll see what I can do to reduce that dependency.

  3. Alright, it’s not perfect, but it’s close. IE doesn’t do dimensions correctly, so things are a little off in IE, and life is too short for me to include the weird CSS hacks to trick IE.

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