58bits - Tech

Well partly as an act of procrastination (the books and reading are piling up), and partly in recognition of the fact that the previous design sucked big time... I've redesigned the blogs and photo gallery. It took three days in total - and I think the results are ok. At least I think it sucks less than the previous design.

Thanks to firebug and a list of fairly well known IE7 issues - it went pretty well this time. No major CSS gottchas... a pretty good two column liquid layout and drop shadow as well as less cruft. I've dropped IE6 support - too much pain to go there and well.. it's my site... :-)

I got all nostalgic and Canadian this evening - after I took my first good look at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's web site. A fantastic site - I was totally blown away. Easily as good as the BBC site if not better and a top level example of brilliant design, XHTML, CSS and JavaScript (including jQuery).

I have a lot of respect for experienced CSS/XHTML designers having lived through two medium size projects that both had accessibility and XHTML Strict requirements - it was tough going. We survived the Peekaboo Bug, the Guillotine Bug, and the Duplicate Characters Bug to name a few.

I recently updated the design of my blog and my photo gallery component. Trying to keep the site IE6 compatible brought back painful memories. Thanks to this kind blogger at 456 Berea St - I managed to squash the last CSS bug in the layout - a problem I was having with space appearing between <li> items in a list that contains block level elements. I was kind of surprised to see this in IE7. The block element in this case was an <a> tag - and needed to have a width or height set in order to close up the gap between the containing <li>s; a very common layout for creating hover effects on menu items in <ul> lists. Sigh.

Lone blogger 1 - IE6/IE7 0