Yesterday I realized that I really need to get on with the redesign when I had to add an !important to get a CSS-rule to apply. Thanks to Firebug 1.0 beta I got a painful visualization of how inefficient the current code can be, my custom rules on top of the Sanbox “Kubrick” skin.
I will kick off this recurring series with an overview of the basic layout options we have at our disposal. It’s nothing especially earth-shattering, but it’s an important issue to think through properly and just because it seem so basic few do. You might already have heard it a thousand times, that “the web isn’t print”, until your ears fell off. But it’s so true when it comes to layout. In print you can easily sketch up a few layout solution to pick from, based on the page size, proportion and content, and call it a day. The web is something completely different as a medium: the user has complete control over the browser viewport size and font size.
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To quote Kenneth Himschoot:
Our W3C, which art on the net:
Hallowed be thy markup.
Thy workingdrafts come.
Thy Specs be done in Mozilla as they are in Opera.
Give us this day our daily XHTLM and forgive us our hacks and workarounds, as we forgive all tablebased designers.
And lead us not to invalid code but deliver us from IE5.
Amen.
One of my previous new year resolutions was to improve my grammar and interpunctuation skills, wished by some teachers that dreaded my long, dwindling (learn to use the comma!?), rambling (or any of its brothers and sisters), rants as sentences. I’m a strong believer in if you’re going to do something do it as good as you possibly can; why I decided to in return become tyrannical in matters towards people that I believe should know better, be it grammatical or typographical.
So I guess I’m one of the few students to have turned in an English test with the words: “I found two typographical errors, I marked them up for you.”
Here’s an idea I’ve been entertaining for some time now and that I would like to see realized: A word navigator. I know that in the field of computational linguistics there’s several implementation of this kind for different areas of our syntactic, lexicographic and semantic network of knowledge for our understanding of language. But what I imagine is a practical application for everyday life and work.
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Over the coming months, I’m going to tear down and redesign this site. I plan to do it slowly, making it a great practice and learning experience for me personally. What I plan to do is chronicle the process, describe steps I’m going to take, what the options are and the rationale behind my choices.
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