raphael.longbournprods.com

Okay, so maybe when you launch a weblog and you do the template yourself and then you say you’re a “web designer”, you might want to take a little more care and effort with your blog so that it doesn’t look like a total piece of shit.

Sorry. I was in a hurry. If visiting this site has in any way caused you any sort of adverse physical effects, such as nausea, I apologize from the bottom of my heart.

And, just out of curiosity, what are those knights on horseback supposed to mean exactly? I thought I’d ask — ’cause I don’t know myself.

And if you’re an Internet Explorer user: sorry. I don’t mean that in a snippy, snobbish sort of way (though I do think life will be better on the Net for you if you visit this), but because, if you’ve visited the site using IE as your browser, and if your browser window is quite narrow, like less than 800 pixels wide, chances are very good that the sidebar which is supposed to be, erm, on the side, was actually underneath the left column. That’s right. Underneath. Great place for a sidebar if you ask me.

Since I was in such a hurry when I threw this sucker together, and since I didn’t really do the amount of browser testing that you really, really should do, all the time, I forgot to think that if I started putting pictures in my posts, and if they were wider than a pinhead, visitors with IE6.0 and narrow screen sizes were going to have their browser jettison the right column in order to have enough room to fit the images.

I is a profetchonal.

(Other browsers don’t suffer from this problem because they understand the CSS min-width rule, which won’t allow liquid designs to shrink beyond a specified minimum width.)

There are some things I did intentionally to IE for this design; what is sometimes called “graceful degradation”. This basically means that, because IE lacks support for a lot of CSS commands, it’s fed a different, more basic type of style for some elements on the page than the more compliant browsers. This is all cosmetic stuff. It’s not like IE users can’t leave comments, or navigate the site (unless the idiot designer has created a situation where IE jettisons the fucking sidebar to the bottom of the page!) — rather, Firefox and Safari and Opera (and so on) users get a bit more eye candy.

As witness the following two shots:

(my homepage in Internet Explorer 6.0 for Windows)

(my homepage in Firefox 1.5 for Windows)

If you look closely at the second picture, you can see that the title of the newest post has a little graphical backdrop, and the logo next to the knight guy is completely different in each picture. Both of the images appearing in the Firefox screenshot are PNGs which use transparency. Since IE6.0 does not support PNGs with transparency, rather than sacrifice the look I wished to achieve in all browsers, I fed IE6.0 a different set of rules, so IE6.0 gets just plain old text in the logo, instead of the glowy text.

These are very subtle differences, of course. Unless and until most Internet Explorer users jump to IE7.0 (which will support PNG transparency, by the way) and its somewhat better CSS support, I’m not going to be doing major structural designs using CSS that IE6.0 does not support, potentially feeding a sizable number of visitors a site which does not work in their browser. My clients might become cross.
By the way, for those of you who didn’t realize, this is why CSS designers are resentful of IE6.0 — it’s still the most-used browser in the world, and as such designers are forced to greatly limit their choice of CSS rules simply because IE6.0 does not understand them. Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari — they’re on more or less equal footing in supporting CSS elements correctly. IE6.0 is not only much more limited in its support, but it also has more bugs implementing the rules it does support than the 405 Freeway has lanes.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the fact that I whipped this site together too fast, not observing very important design rules, and failing to rigorously test test test. As soon as I find the time, I think a bit of a re-design is in order, one that has a bit less knights in shining armor and a bit more useful layout and structure.

However, because I do know that a few of you have dropped on by using IE6, I thought you might be interested in a tiny peek at what more contemporary browsers might do for you, here or elsewhere.

Now, what should be my theme next? Something intergalactic, with spacemen floating against the inky blackness? A desert landscape teeming with strange wild creatures? A fetish scene with lots of hot babes in rubber catstuits … ? I wonder …

Posted Friday, May 5th, 2006 at 2:30 pm. Filed under Uncategorized, blogging, web design. Feed: RSS 2.0
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