I cannot say enough good about Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics by Jennifer Niederst Robbins. This book is a life saver for programmers trying to learn a something about web design. Does it make me an expert? No! Does it help me learn what goes into web design? Yes! Can it help me make my web site better? Yes!

I spent most of the day working on a subtle problem. Firefox seemed to be repositioning the footer on my page whenever I moused over or clicked my navigation list. Using Robbins' book, I was able to isolate and debug the problem. It turned out I had two style sheet anchor elements interacting in an unwanted way. In addition, the focus rectangle that Firefox places on items that are clicked caused the navigation <div> to resize slightly, sending the footer into a tizzy.

Anyway, if you don't know web design, this is the book to start with. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

I needed to cut the grass on Saturday. My son is off to college, so the job is left to me. I've kidded my daughter about learning to use the lawn mower, but that hasn't gone anywhere. So, it's up to me.

But yesterday, I spent the day at the stables. After watching my daughter jump and semi-concentrating on a book about web design, I decided to help the trainer by digging a milk weed relative out of the horse paddocks. The weed is nasty. The horses won't eat it and it draws water into it's root system like a vacuum pump, drying out the surrounding soil. I managed to clear one paddock and two thirds of another before the heat became too intense. I spent the next half hour dangling my feet in the trainer's pool to cool off.

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The one thing you can depend on when there are specifications is that if there is wiggle room for interpretation of the spec, there will be differences in the implementation and the final results. In the case of W3C, CSS and browsers, there is definitely wiggle room and both FireFox and IE developers have chosen their own paths. I pretty much lost my mind working on a layout problem last night. I was up until 1:45 AM working on a subtle difference between IE and FireFox which had a major (and unwanted) impact on how google ads are positioned on the screen.

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I've settled on a final design for the web site. Please give a look at root web site, codewiz51. Compare this page to the old index page. I like the change in  menu structure, which is style sheet driven and uses an unordered list for the structure. The use of an external style sheet and a master page have simplified the page design. I will move the rest of the pages to the new design sometime this weekend.

I am excited, as the new design will make it a lot easier to develop content. I should be able to get back to content development. WinROTT, here I come! 

I managed to muddle through Scott Mitchell's tutorials for master page usage. I have a new test page up and running, which integrates some basic css positioning and a test master page. This page is a work in progress, so it will change dramatically as my skills with CSS improve.

I discovered that IE 7 and Firefox pad the <form> tag differently, so I had to add the following to my css file: 

Happy coding!

I'm concentrating on developing an external style sheet for my "soon to be redesigned"^* web site. I am attemping to move away from Frontpage 2003. I have some expermentation to show for all of my research. Check out the sandbox. I've attempted writing three column style sheets, but I have too much to learn and I want to get on with content development, not web site design. I am, after all, a C++ programmer with some C# skills and CLI skills.

I recently found Matthew Taylor's web site, which offers several layouts and Eric Costello's personal web site that offers some excellent examples. The layout you see in the sandbox is modified from glish. I plan to experiment with Taylor's three column layout, as it offers some nice effects I'd like to implement. I found a technique for using lists to emulate tabbed menus on Taylor's site. It appears that The Telegraph and Fox News use this technique and extend it to a two row, stacked menu with extensions. I like this technique because it is lightweight text with no graphics to download and it has nice mouse over effects. Taylor has a display page that illustrates the use of styles with tabbed menus.

^* I should trademark this phrase, or patent it as a mindless content filler expression.