December 27, 2004
Year End Disarray

It’s the time of year I feel compelled to tidy my computer world. I really ought to be scrubbing the apartment, but my online house is pretty scruffy.

One big project: I’m simplifying the website. Features have been removed, slashed away like old boots off a fishing line. I’ve instituted a monochromatic color scheme. Everything’s pared down. I’m working towards XHTML compliance.

For the next couple of days I will continue tweaking the layout, and more importantly the content, to get things where I want them. In the meantime, pardon the stray pages and any oddities you might discover.

(P.S. If you are still using Internet Explorer, may I suggest you try Firefox instead? It’s free, easy to use, a breeze to switch to, and won’t make my nice website look all bizarre.)

Posted by kuri at December 27, 2004 11:31 PM

Comments

You sound like me in reverse - for years my site has been tailored for IE, and doesn’t show up right in Firefox. But I just switched to Firefox myself just two days ago, so my next big project will be a paring down/redesign that gets my site compliant with Mozilla.

If only I knew what I were doing I wouldn’t be nearly so daunted… :)

Posted by: Amy on December 28, 2004 05:47 AM

Hi Kristen,
First and most important: set a doctype … check out http://www.alistapart.com/articles/doctype/ for reasons. Even IE will understand your page better for it 8-). Oh and don’t add an xml declaration at the start otherwise IE is back in quirks mode again. Your layout should look fine in IE. It is the ones that really try and strech the rules that break IE.

Posted by: Steve Gunnell on December 28, 2004 08:57 AM

Already had a doctype set (XHTML transitional) and witha bit of tweaking of unclosed br tags and stray ampersands, the page now validates. Haven’t done anything terribly tricky with the CSS just some basic floats for positioning, but it is rendered entirely wrong in IE 5.2 on the Mac. Grrrrr.

Posted by: Kristen on December 28, 2004 09:25 AM

Sorry, I didn’t see the doctype when I checked the page source earlier. It is definitely there now. Hmmm. I hear IE on a Mac is more quirky but even so. I see you have a bunch of bare text wrapped only in div tags. You will probably need to wrap them in header or paragraph tags because the div isn’t a display tag ( neither is an a tag by itself ). There is a good list od IE5 / Mac bugs here: http://www.macedition.com/cb/ie5macbugs/
IIRC IE isn’t going to like the combination of ‘float: left and a margin-left: ’ or the ‘float: right and margin-right: ’ specs in your css. The usual solution is to replace the margin with a padding. But there is another solution here: http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/floatIndent.html

Once you have XHTML Transitional it is really easy to go to XHTML Strict. Good luck!

Posted by: Steve Gunnell on December 28, 2004 11:14 AM

I like that little spiral on the side! Seems kinda familiar…!

Posted by: j-ster on December 28, 2004 02:36 PM

I like the new design, but I must say that it’s very grey. I think the whole right hand side needs some kind of rainbow fish scale effect. Good work though. :)

Posted by: womble on January 4, 2005 09:55 PM

It’s not grey, it’s purple. Well, purplish grey.

Posted by: Kristen on January 5, 2005 09:19 AM
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