Experimental new theme available
Just a quick one to explain that there is a new layout and graphical theme for the SlashBoot site. It started out as an experiment to see how I could wrap right around a DIV to produce a subtle shadow effect, using eight images, one in each corner and one for each straight side. This sort of thing is a doddle using standard HTML tables, but I want to try to refrain from those kinds of methods if possible and do it using pure XHTML strict and CSS.
I'm reasonably pleased with the effect, but it doesn't scale well if you turn up text sizes, which I hope to address at some stage, again without resorting to using tables for layout. I have kind of used tables for the left column and main content division, by making divs behave like tables, using CSS. At present, as there three themes, which I call bluesky (for non-IE5/6 browsers) for the experimental theme, fixedblue for all browsers and unimaginatively, default is the default theme, I am using a simple cookie based mechanism for toggling between the two or three themes.
Let me know what you think and if you can suggest a better, more scalable way of doing it, it would be much appreciated. I've discovered a really weird glitch using the bluesky theme, whereby I can only display three button images at the bottom. This could be something wrong with my browser, or even the server as I am overworking it a bit at the moment. Any subsequent buttons placed after the three that are there are truncated midway through the markup of the fourth linked button, along with the remainder of the document. It's a strange one and I'm struggling to pin it down, but I'm sure that I will get there and will look into it in the next few days.
Tested on animals
Because I point-blank refuse to have Microsoft Windows on any of my hardware, the new theme has not been tested on Internet Explorer. Saying that, I have only ever tested the default site theme for IE, via some of the browser screenshot facilities on the web. It doesn't look quite right in IE6, but that is because the markup is standards compliant and IE6 isn't. The default display does display quite well under the Betas of IE7, which is supposed to be more standards compliant, but that matters not to me.
As Microsoft are never likely to allow their browser rendering engine to be used on anything other than Windows, I've taken the decision to just give up trying to support their browser on my personal sites. Majority market share doesn't mean correct and all it really shows is just how much Microsoft abuse their dominant position. Their decision to stop supporting Apple Mac users, probably because it uses a BSD variant, is further proof of this. Apologies to anybody who is put out by this, but take some advice and go get yourself a free, standards compliant web browser like the excellent Firefox on most platforms, Safari on Mac, Opera on many platforms, or any of the other good ones. Come into line with 'the rest of the world' who aren't gullible enough to allow Microsoft to dictate their computer usage. The more weight that is given to independant, internationally agreed standards, the higher the likelihood that Microsoft will bend to the world, rather than bending the world to them. Sorry, rant over.
The themes have been tested in MSIE 6 via screenshot facilities on the web, and locally from my OpenBSD machine, using the following browsers:
- Firefox 1.5.0.4
- Galeon 1.3.21
- Opera 9
- Epiphany 1.4.8
Pages display to my satisfaction in the browsers listed above. Konqueror and IE 5.x/6 are the most problematic so far.
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