17 June 2001

War on Frames and Tables

A fair amount of the day has been spent working up a stylesheet for the website redesign. I've scrapped the frames, but I'm still using a left navigation menu that takes up roughly 20% of the screen, with the contents taking up about 75% (roughly). The tricky part is, I'm not using tables to set these up, but instead am controlling all of it with CSS2 specifications. It's really interesting -- and really meticulous. It's about damn time I wrote a standards compliant website, however.

So I've worked out some basics -- the left navigation menu is pretty much ready, it just needs all of the content and hyperlinks added. And there will be several navigation menus (context-specific), because after fooling around with a few collapsible javascript and dhtml menus, I just decided that approach was too cluttered and brower-specific. My goal here is simplicity in design, and I wasn't getting it that way. So we'll do that some other time. Or not.

There is still a lot to be done. I haven't figured out what I'm going to do about the older (pre-GreyMatter) parts of the site that were written when I didn't give a flip about standards or style sheets or separating content from layout. Probably nothing. The GreyMatter parts can be rebuilt with the new template very easily, once I finish it. But we're not even close to that point yet. Maybe next weekend.

* * * *

In the meantime, it seems our offices are supposed to be open Monday, but I'm going to work from home a few more days while they sort out the chaos. Maybe by Wednesday they will have everything working.

[Posted @ 11:38 PM CST]