Rodent Regatta

My all star designer dropped a comment by here that explained what I had done to create problems viewing this weblog with other browsers. I had forgotten to switch the DOCTYPE for this site after doing some experimenting. That’s been fixed. The better news is that I’m now down to 280 validation errors. I’ll continue to find the problems and fix them.

Tonight I looked at this site using IE6, Mozilla 1.7b, FireFox 0.8 and Opera 7.23. There are substantial differences in how the site looks, and I can’t figure out why.

If someone spots something in my content or in my style sheet that needs to change, please let me know!

Paul Scrivens is planning a redesign of his site(s), and he’s doing it where we can all observe the thought processes. Here’s the first mention of it. He also introduced another non-scientific poll before returning to Redesign 2004: Thinking I and Thinking II.

If you haven’t visited the CSS Zen Garden recently, you might want to take a look at some of the recent designs that have been added. Go to the site and notice the list of alternative styles in either the right or left sidebars depending upon the style you have on screen at the moment. There is also the archive of all designs.

For those who haven’t been initiated into the finer points of web design, there are emerging standards for web design. One of the key pillars in the standards is ”separation of style from content.” Typically, this means we should use CSS to style a page and XHTML for the content.

The CSS Zen Garden illustrates this by allowing you to see identical content styled in many different ways. Be aware that when you change from one style to the next, you’re not seeing another copy of the content at another site. Rather, the stylesheet has been switched for the lone copy of the content that exists.

Bandwidth, download times and future changes are efficiently managed with CSS. It is truly the most effective way to develop web sites. Notice that you can view the CSS style sheet for each design. It’s the perfect place to learn CSS.

If what I’m typing here renders properly when I post it, I will have made one of the big leaps up my learning curve for XHTML. Steven Vore posted a comment that leads me to believe that I can enter markup the following ways:

• & was entered by typing shift-7
• & was entered by typing &

Now I know how to properly show markup that I want to discuss. This is big! Next, I want to learn how to modify my CSS template so that code carries a different color background, indenting and a special blockquote border.