CSS Frustrations

Come on team, it's bobsled time...


So I was bored last night and decided to replace the "minima" theme with one of my own. I really like everything to be simple and functional, but it was just a bit too bland before.

Now, I don't know if you've ever done website layout before, but it is a pain in the ass. I started by switching out the title for a nice photoshopped header, which I added a one pixel stroke too. My plan was line this border up with some borders for the rest of the elements in the page. I also made a light gradient for the background just to add a little... zing?

Now that I had my graphics and my crude plan, I went to work on the CSS. For those of you who don't code, it's kind of hard to describe the idiosyncrasies associated with CSS - It's kind of like writing a book using only abbreviations and acronyms. One person my read this book (let's call him...Firefox) and it makes perfect sense, but when someone else skims through it (how about...Internet Explorer) they think that your margin is 8000 pixels wide and you want your archive hanging out below the rest of your entire site.

It seems like life would be a whole lot easier if someone wrote out some set of rules and standards as to how to read this book. Well, turns out that is actually the case. There's a group of people called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that has drawn up standards on how to read CSS (among many other standards). However, Internet Explorer is still trying to catch up to today's technology, and is only now in IE7 actually coming up the standards.

Now, it would be nice to only need to worry about writing CSS for a standards-compliant browser, such as Firefox or Opera, but since most of the world (roughly 80% of internet users) still use IE, designing a simple layout turns into a much bigger problem than it should be.


In short, that's the reason some border lines may be one pixel off the header. Or, perhaps you're using some crazy browser and everything is completely jacked. If this is the case, leave a comment.



Something to listen to: OneLineDrawing - We Had a Deal
Something to do: Get firefox (link in sidebar)