CSS closure

26 May 2006

It’s been so long since I’ve actually “finished” a stylesheet on a real site (not some tiny two-page thing or an application) that I don’t remember how to let go. I keep looking around for the little things I’ve missed (they’ll always be there), but there’s increasing amounts of nothing. I’ve got to say that it’s fun to do having taken a break (not intentionally, just played out that way because other stuff was going on) for a couple of months… though I’m a little more jaded about having to use abs pos and floats everywhere, etc., this time around.

I think it’s coz I haven’t done my own designs for quite a while (and am hence contending with table-thought). I need to get my hand in again.

This time it’ll probably be back to a darker base. Cyclic, I tell you! I was actually thinking of something like Ellen’s blog has (only with blue and some colour and less random stuff and without annoying IE-proprietary coloured black-on-black scroll bars!) but was researching some JavaScript stuff today and came across some dark blogs and wow did my eyes like that. Probably because between a white design and a white-base code window on two monitors I effectively spent at least 8 hours today staring at panels of light… but I’m actually now starting to see the benefits of dark-based high-contrast designs.

I’m probably just going blind, but statistically that places my preferences closer to those of most of the web, so designers that like tiny type can suck my text-zooming browser. Whilst I make your pretty pixel-perfect designs look horrible as they scale.

I don’t want elastic designs, I want designs that don’t give a crap what you do to them. That, if you explode them into lots of little pieces, aren’t overlapping themselves and flow just fine. I kinda feel like I’m still trying to justify this present design (which, if I haven’t said this before, actually had its origins as a print stylesheet… it’s called “SC ClearPrint” for that reason), but if I am I hope to equally be justifying the next. Hoping for something equally functional but slightly prettier.

Whilst talking about styles, handheld styles are actually overrated if you’ve got a single-column layout. Even if you don’t, good handheld/mobile browsers mostly overcome the worst of the web. Semantic markup is actually quite important, having said that, because it reduces code-bloat by so much. When you’ve got minimal amounts of memory and a relatively slow processor, that kinda stuff matters irrespective of bandwidth.

(Aside: it amuses me to note that, with the exception of disk space, my PDA is more powerful than the first computer we owned — purchased in 1996(/5?), with a P-133/32MB/4GB/1MB gfx)

Yeah. Sufficiently off-topic to end this here methinks.