HEADS UP: Website Overhaul

Dave Cuthbert dacut at neolinear.com
Wed Mar 10 09:44:36 PST 2004


Gary Thorpe wrote:
David Cuthbert wrote:
Personally, I limit myself to simple tables and font styles.  Oh, I
know about the advantages of CSS and such; but preprocessed HTML works
much more reliably.
Using tables to format text is bad style and the ugliest but most 
popular hack on the internet. It doesn't "look" that fancy when you have 
to use a text browser (instead of the memory gobbling mozilla).
What should one use, then?  Frames?  Divs?  Neither of those look all 
that great in lynx, either.

And if you seperate the style from the content, it will be easier to 
maintain: will it be easier to go through and edit a dozen documents 
that have particular fonts or edit the one stylesheet they all included 
for the same look and feel?
Easier to keep the document separate from HTML completely and preprocess 
it, bypassing buggy CSS implementations completely.

Of late, I've even foregone much of that, limiting myself to Wikis and,
when a Wiki isn't available, wrapping everything in <pre> tags (see
http://www.kanga-da.org/ for example).
This is dirt simple to do in standard HTML and you won't have to rely 
and manually inserting tabs/spaces: the layout cannot be that crucial 
anyway.
Yeah, but manually inserting tabs/spaces becomes almost WYSIWYG in 
emacs. :-)

The layout is crucical.  It's impossible to read prose, especially when 
interspersed with bits of code, when you don't have appropriate 
paragraph breaks and indentation.  I got a readable layout on the first 
try, rather than mucking around with HTML, saving, loading in three 
different browsers to see what bugs the HTML exposes, editing, saving, ...

Nor do I have to worry about overly long lines.

And it's viewable in lynx, too!  Heck, it almost looks the same in lynx 
as Mozilla!





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