Trying to redesign my site. Trying to do the right things, but in the 2-3 years since I did this design, the web got really complicated. I still get HTML. I understand my content caught up in presentation, just like I like my jokes told by a funny person rather than written down in logic statements expressed in esperanto.
I could build the design I want to do in a couple of hours in HTML. If I did I get the feeling that I would be banished from the village in rags and never spoken of again. I also get the feeling that once I left the village I’d find a whole wide world full of uncomplicated places; free of the perpetual, byzantine betterment of the blogosphere.
I’ll try and give all this new fangled stuff another go though.
Sigh.
What does a DIV do again? Ugh.
Petafloptimism 
Why don’t you show us what the couple hours of HTML design looks like. Are you afraid to use tables and other “quick and dirty” HTML? They work, generally, so perfectly, and they’re so fast to code up.
HTML should be more like how folks describe Macs: it should help you get your work done, instead of making you work.
Don’t listen to the shame-mongers.
Listen to your instincts. Oh, and Mark Pilgrim.
No! Listen not to Danny: the sunshine has rotted his brain. You shall suffer with the rest of us. Take your validation like a man!
(Actually, I really like XHTML now – it makes re-redesigns much easier.)
It’s not that tables and font tags are easier than divs and CSS… I don’t think learning the latter is any harder than if you had to learn tables and font tags from scratch. It can just seem superfluous when you think “I can do this one un-trendy way, so why do I have to learn a new way?” Personally I love divs and CSS.
The joke/analogy isn’t quite right… the funny person is the presentation layer – a decent stylesheet and stuff – reading a clearly written down joke (let’s say, typed in clear English). He knows how to make the joke funny. The alternative is a joke-teller who has the joke in his head, jumbled up with instructions for when to give comic pauses, do double-takes, etc. If you’re lucky it’ll come out just the same, but it’s going to be hard to do the same joke any differently. And it’s going to be harder to put the joke in a form a deaf person will understand.
No! Listen not to Danny: the sunshine has rotted his brain. You shall suffer with the rest of us. Take your validation like a man!
(Actually, I really like XHTML now – it makes re-redesigns much easier.)
how to achieve a 95% improvement in your site:
get rid of that background gif.
Shame on yo, jonesy.
It’s not a complicated process – you’re just fighting entrenched patterns of behaviour. There is little that you can build in tables that remains impossible to put into CSS if you want to push heavily in that direction. I’m not a great one for developing perfectly accessible or well-validating sites – I’m drearily pragmatic about the amount of effort I’m prepared to invest versus the amount of people it helps… But at the same time, it is a hell of a lot MORE accessible than it used to be. If you need any help with the process of redesign and rebuilding, then just let me know…
Matt’s talking about style-sheets? Ohhhhhhhhhhh. I thought he was getting all panicky about RDF and ting.
Oh no, stylesheets are nice. And even XHTML just means you have to think about less stuff, and validation just means you now have a magic thing that tells you when you’ve messed up.
It’s all just the same as it was – you go out, find a site you like, and view source the shit out of it. You just have to be a bit pickier about sites…
These were good for me:
http://www.bluerobot.com/web/layouts/
http://glish.com/css/
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/index.html
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/journey/
Welcome to the future. Matt you will be so happy once you get your mind around divs, XHTML, and CSS. All of this is not too difficult and it is wonderful to maintain.
oh good grief… you coding this by hand? Its not 1996 anymore you know. Whack out valid coded XHTML + CSS pages in dreamweaver mx in minutes, it no longer sucks or does strange things and you can watch as it writes your html for you, tweak as you go along. A useful design tool should not be ignored in favour of a hair shirt.
I have to confess that I still don’t output valid XHTML, but CSS really is lovely – the hardest bit is getting used to the way of doing column layouts, which turn out to be nearly identical to the old ways we used to use the ALIGN attribute of the IMG tag to shove the image over to one side. The links that Danny posted are good for that.
The rest of it’s a piece of piss. It really is all so much easier than mucking about with FONT tags and the like, especially because you can now get much closer to describing in code what you actually want the thing to look like rather than a ton of crappy hackarounds that semi-accidentally work out the right way. And once you look at your resulting code, it’s like this gorgeous wave of light and beauty washing over you and you raise your hands to heaven and shout “LORD! I HAVE BEEN CLEANSED!” And then people look at you funny, and you have to stab them.
Couldn’t agree more. Once upon a time you could teach HTML to kids, in an hour, and I did.
Nowadays you have two simple choices…whether to be first out of the blocks, or the one with the sprint finish…. i.e
1. Start in HTML and regret it later when you have a complex and arbitrary collection of difficult to maintain files.
2. Have the pain first attempting to get your pages to look half decent and pass the validator tests.
Either way, you get the pain.
I still use html tables.
Many bloggers are web developers, and many of them know of the value of separating content from it’s presentation. They know that tightly integrating your content with its presentation is a bad thing because making
I still use html tables.
Many bloggers are web developers, and many of them know of the value of separating content from it’s presentation. They know that tightly integrating your content with its presentation is a bad thing because making
I still use html tables.
Many bloggers are web developers, and many of them know of the value of separating content from it’s presentation. They know that tightly integrating your content with its presentation is a bad thing because making
I still use html tables.
Many bloggers are web developers, and many of them know of the value of separating content from its presentation. They know that tightly integrating your content with its presentation is a bad thing because making