Matthias: blog
Das Logfile über mein Leben im Netz.

Anarchists defacing blog.ch! Montag, 13. Dezember 2004, 18:06:18

Relax, nobody's defacing blog.ch; I just needed a sensationalist title. Sorry. Now do read on, it's quite interesting.

In the tradition of The CSS Anarchist's Cookbook (German translation), sis created his own user stylesheet for http://www.blog.ch/ because he didn't like my flexible layout. Now he can view blog.ch the way he likes it, with a fixed width and other style changes, e.g. a different header background.

From a conceptual point of view, I still prefer my fully flexible version. Web pages aren't printed on paper, and fixing the width breaks the most fundamental feature of GUIs: Resizable windows. They were first implemented in 1981 in the Xerox Star and remain one of the most important feature of a GUI. It's too bad that many people don't realize the potential of this feature.

But I disgress. Visually, the version with his own backgrounds is far more polished than mine, I have to admit. Perhaps a combination of flexible & more polished visuals? I'll think about it.

CSS has been around for eight years, but even today many designers don't know how to use it, and apart from some users with special needs, nobody works with user stylesheets. Therefore I'm really glad that sis went to the trouble and adjusted the site to his needs; it's very good to see people exploit the power of CSS!

To make further third-party redesigns even easier, I slightly changed the code. The structure and naming convention now (more or less closely) follows the suggestions outlined by Eric Meyer and Andy Clarke. Here's the basic structure:


<body id="www-blog-ch">
    <div id="head">
        <h1>blog.ch</h1>
        <p id="nav"></p>
    </div>
    <div id="feat">
        <div>
            <h3>Bloggertreffen</h3>
            <p>Text</p>
        </div>

        <div>
            <h3>News</h3>
            <p>Newsmeldungen</p>
        </div>
    <div id="content">
        <h3>Datum</h3>
        <p class="feed">
            <a href="">RSS</a><a class="title">Item title</a> Blog name
        </p>
    </div>
    <p id="footer"></p>
</body>

I didn't analyze sis' user stylesheet; perhaps my new code structure breaks it for the moment. But in the long run, the new blog.ch is a more customizable solution. Have fun!

And as always, suggestions are welcome