Anyone using Opera?

[Alimonster]

The new design is quite nice. Though, personally I like the old one more. Can't really say why, I thinks is it colors :?

Hmm, okay... :? Maybe it would help if I fixed up some of the layout issues in earlier browsers first! (I have IE5.5 at work here, so I've been able to *hopefully* make it look a little more acceptable without breaking other browsers...)

Anyway, I looked through the code and the first thing I noticed were all the layers. Why not tables instead? It's much easier (well, at least I think so). Layers can be quite a pain in the xxx if you use javascript. Especially if you want it to work under every browser.

I don't! I want it to work under CSS 2 compliant browsers - which means just Mozilla at the mo (perhaps Opera will get close, not sure yet). There are far too many potential hacks otherwise. This is my "pet project" - a totally standard compliant site design. I'm not going to hack it, but instead will just wait for the browsers to catch up. I'm not uglifying my HTML to cater for broken browers any more! The only hack I have so far is the javascript for browsers that don't supply css2 selectors in the about page (meaning, IE).

Another problem that happens quite often is wrong positioning. In IE5.5 the space between the text and the menu is about 3~5 pixel, where in Info section the three boxes are located at the far right of the screen.

Yeah, IE5 actually does a surprisingly good job given its broken CSS 1 (!)implementation (actually, it gets the sidebar more correct than IE6!). I spotted that about box thing but I'm not sure yet why it happens [note: I think I've fixed it now...].

Second, I saw you use <span> quite often, however, this tag does not work with netscape. A (nested) layer should help here. If you decide to change the whole layer thing into a table, you probably won't have to use span at all.

Bear in mind that there is a fundamental difference in the meaning of the span vs div tags - the span tag creates an inline element while the div tag creates a block element. Of course, you can override this default in css, though that swiftly becomes a pain in the butt. (Side note: unless you mean Netscape 7, though I'd guess that it would support it due to its Mozilla heritage...).

However, there's a pretty big advantage of not using tables except for genuinely tabular data (rather than layout) - you get complete separation of content from presentation. This means that in future, I'll be able to write different stylesheets and switch between them. This will not only let me modify the colours/fonts but also the *positioning!*

Btw, here's an interesting thing: I set the border style to "dotted." Under IE, it looks like it's "dashed" instead (which was *not* my intention!). I'm very surprised at this - it seems to be that dotted should be the simplest thing in the world to support! (Draw one pixel, don't draw, draw, don't draw...). See the previous pics and note that it looks better with dotted, rather than dashed, borders.

It's not my intention to make it viewable under earlier browsers (meaning <= IE6). I'll redirect dependent on the browser when they hit the title page, you see - some people will get the old design, while some people will get the new one.