jmoiron.net

As many of those who would possibly care have been told personally by me, and those who quite possibly do not care have been notified in my latest journal post, theres a new site design being debugged currently. There are a few quite errors that I still have to stamp out; errors caused by either laziness, bad style, bad structure, or just quirky behavior. I'll need help testing this on other browsers since my system currently only has Links and Firefox 0.8.

XHTML Compliance

• "img" tags aren't closed
• "img" tags have "border=" in them -- change to CSS
• & 's occur in links that aren't "amp;"-ed

Visual

• The verticle position of the content from the banner is a little awkward, and changes radically in different browsers
• The green color is not 16 bit friendly.
• The verticle position of the content does not line up in Opera
• The seperate timestamp and title "boxes" were a quick hack to get something presentable. I'm still unsure of how to change it to make it better; I don't want negative margins.
• The arrow images that replace my bullets get 2 or so pixels cut off initially, but on reload (tested in Firefox 0.8 for Linux and Firebird 0.6 for NetBSD) seem to work.
• No attention paid to other sections of the site that may or may not be broken

I'm still not sure what exactly I want to do with the design; I wanted a dark color with a warm, organic feel.. but not too warm (ie. not red). Initially I wanted a tree, but the sunflower seems to work pretty well. I've been trying to test it with the NetBSD ports of Konqueror and Opera (because I don't want them mucking up my clean install), but the versions in the lab are pretty old (3.1.3 for Konq and 7.2.3 for Opera, which actually seems kinda recent).

As soon as I get the major sections ironed out and XHTML compatibility, I'll probably push the design to the main site. This might take a few days; although I didn't change the structure of the site much (besides adding a container in and cleaning up the menu for more ( CSS control), since I'm not a structure zealot and tend to have a loose style to my markup, I need to make little tweaks and revise my earlier structure to be more normalized and easily styled as I go along. The existing white and blue style can probably be saved; although I'm not sure about the old sand style (which I still have).

Another plan that I have that is at this point so tedious that I dread its eventuality is to go through the archives and clean them up; not only for compliance (I'm sure its broken somewhere) but also for uniformity, and dare I say for spelling and grammar. I ridicule others for being so anal about it, but what use is structure and style standards when I don't conform to the standards of the English language... standards like capitalization, punctuation (hint hint, all ye trendy)... and spelling. Note that non-standard uses of ellipses will remain as I maintain some poetic license.

This rediculous dance that people do every time they design a website makes me think that maybe someone could design a browser with a really dynamic HTML engine hotplug system that could just load and unload different engines so you can see what your site looks in another browser by basically running the engine of that other browser. It'd be some kind of Utopian world browser; although I doubt that such a thing is infeasible (as almost nothing is in the world of software), I certainly am not going to be the one to do it, and I doubt that anyone else out there will take the time and energy necessary to do it properly.