Look Ma, No Tables
#
Tonico Strasser at WebProducer.at -
Flexible Layout - I adapted this layout over the weekend to
produce what you're looking at now. The left column is a fixed width
to accomodate the images. The right column is 10 ems wide, so it will
expand when you change the font. It works for me in Opera 7.22 and IE
6 on Windows and in IE 5 in Mac OSX.
Changes: I removed the little logo in the upper-right-hand corner, and
the link to weblogs.com. I removed the line of links below the big
site name at the top of the page. I'll restore that if enough people
tell me they miss it. The link to the permanent version of each day's
page is in a "#" to the left of the date (e.g. "# Monday, January 26,
2004") instead of in an icon that looked like a book ( )
at the right end of the black title bar. The "Last update..." message
is now at the end of the center column; I so seldom change the page
more than once a day that it really doesn't need a place of
prominence.
This page is still not quite valid XHTML. It's got a DOCTYPE at the
beginning identifying it as "HTML 4.01 Transitional". It still has
lots of <b> and lone <p> tags. I need to make some changes to
BlogMax to make those go away. But overall, I'm pretty happy with
it. I hope you like it too.
Oh, it should work nicely on old browsers that don't grok CSS or on
text-mode browsers. It no longer depends on tables, and the middle
column text appears first in the source, which makes it marginally
better for text-mode browsers (e.g.
Lynx). It probably will NOT work nicely in browsers that grok only
CSS 1, like Netscape 4 and friends. If enough people have a problem,
I'll work on giving you a way to turn off the styles.
And I lied a little about the tables. I do not intend to attempt to do
the calendar in CSS. It's the kind of grid that tables were made
for. I do, however, intend to add some styles to the calendar
generation code so that people can change the appearance of the
calendar.
# Baen Books - Freehold by Michael Z. Williamson is now available in mass market paperback. The link points to an on-line version of the first 14 (of 54) chapters. I read this a while back and enjoyed it. You can choose a bookseller in a long list provided by Baen, or buy from Amazon for $6.99 plus shipping. [smith2004]