My comment over at Jeremy blog managed to get somewhat botched so here is it in its original glory:
My approach from now will be fluid layouts using max-width (or “telescoping” layouts as I like to call them) and deal with IE6 using Dean Edwards IE7 script as Eric pointed out a long time ago (at least in internet time).
That leaves us with IE6 browsers with JavaScript turned off and other non-webstandard complying browsers. My hunch is that a fluid layout will look pretty decent in these cases anyway. In terms of Yahoo Graded Browser Support: these aren’t our A-grade browsers. One can not make a web site look exactly the same for all types of browsers, but then that’s the idea behind going fluid.
I haven’t yet managed to read through all the other comments that post generated. It’s a nice concept that Jeremy has going by the way, allowing commenting on posts selectively and not display them publicly until the commenting is closed.
I can’t figure out why the PNG transparency wont apply to the artwork in my previous “Redesign Chronicle” when viewing the post in IE6 — despite the fact that I’m using Dean Edwards IE7 script and the files end in -trans.png. Arrrgh!
Update: I’ve cracked it! Turned out that it was the PNG files themselves. The illustrations were drawn with Inkscape as vector graphics (SVG to be precise) and rasterized as PNG with the softwares own bitmap exporter. However, Inkscape seem to produce PNG files that Internet Explorer doesn’t like and the transparency bugfix can’t do anything about. But the solution was simple: just open each PNG file in Gimp and re-save it. Of course, I could also have opened each SVG file in Gimp and saved the PNGs from there.
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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