Rodent Regatta

Paul Scrivens has published a list of awards. The comments aren’t bad either!

Dan Cederholm was running a book giveaway. Comments yielded links to sites or articles about web standards. Now there’s a list of all the links. You can also get to them at Orderedlist.com.

[7] Russ: How do you deal with the ’IE factor’ when building layouts in CSS?

Molly: I start drinking earlier and earlier in the day!

Seriously, my preferred method is to design to the ideal. I develop in Mozilla first, and then determine how to re-fit for IE 6.0 and other browsers. This might not be the best solution for everyone, but I find that it helps me because I can create really solid CSS and then study which workarounds and hacks I have to employ to achieve results for IE. Then, using strategies such as placing hacks in individual CSS files and then importing the hacks into my primary CSS document allows me to remove the hack the moment it’s no longer needed. I simply remove one line of CSS from the main CSS document and delete the CSS document containing the hack, moving ever closer to the original clean, idealistic CSS.

from Ten Questions for Molly Holzschlag

No matter how much I read about web standards, web design and what processes people use to do their work, I learn something new nearly every day. As many times as I’ve heard about the problems of IE6, I think Molly’s interview explains the issues as well as any. If you’re not a regular visitor to her site, take a look. Oh yeah, more books are on the way!

The folks at Six Apart have changed their licensing arrangements. The new prices certainly seem to align well with the ways that people use the product.

Though I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d be in this mode, I’m rethinking some choices I’ve made recently. WordPress seems to be thriving, but documentation is scattered making it tough for a rookie user to pick the product up and produce a really attractive, fully functional web site.

Textpattern, while providing some sensational features and a future that looks very bright, is several steps behind WordPress. Textpattern is still ”gamma” software. There is virtually no documentation.

All things equal, I’d have a list of specs for moving this weblog to Textpattern with some alterations or updates to the look of the site. All things are not equal.

How will I handle this? Not sure. Perhaps I’ll update MT and continue my work with Textpattern. It’s bound to move out of gamma and into a newbie-friendly mode soon.

Westciv has a new site design. It’s a huge improvement. It would seem that the headstart that Topstyle has might get a little tighter if Westciv stays the course.