Re: Gnhuherds: Tableless layout

[Victor Engmark]

On 10/10/07, Antenore Gatta <address@hidden> wrote:

I've started to develop the Gnu Herds tableless layout.

With Davi we discussed to use or not the html transitional, but
finally I've decided to rewrite the html using html strict.

Enclosed you find the tarbal of the layout, they are w3c valid html and css2.

Please let me know any improvements, disagreement or ideas!!!

Looks nice! I'm not sure which level of detail you'd like for the feedback, but here are some things I noted:

A screenshot from Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Ubuntu Feisty is worth 1000 words :)

• You might wanna define a background color for body, so that things outside the contents don't get the default browser color
• The floating menu should fit with the main contents - I don't have any tips here, except that IIRC it's really difficult :/ One way to test a solution is to change the text size in the browser a lot and see if things start breaking.
  

Do you want to specify MSSmartTagsPreventParsing? I'm guilty of that myself, but I'm not sure whether we should override user settings that way.

Specifying a min-width on the body should make sure you avoid problems with extreme resizing of the window. A better way is to make sure the page can be linearized - 
I.e., elements would appear on top of each other instead of at the side when the screen is really small. This can easily be done by setting block-level elements to inline. If this creates problems, make sure just the element, and not the children, are inline.

A more semantic version of
            <p>
                <a href="" />
                <br />
         

       <a href="" person</a><br />
                <a href="" company</a><br />
                <a href="" non-profit</a>

                <br />
            </p>
could be 
<ul class="menu">

  <li><a href="" id="lost-password">Lost password?</a>

</li>
  <li><a href="">

person/">...


...

</ul>
with CSS:
ul.menu {
list-style-type: none;
}
li {

white-space: nowrap;

}
#lost-password {

margin-bottom: 1em;
}

That should look the same (you might have to adjust the left-margins), it's more semantic, and I've read somewhere that the extra slash at the end of the URL ensures that the server doesn't perform an extra operation to check whether the target is a file or directory.

In general, paragraphs should be restricted to actual text, not menus and such. For the language menu, you can see 
my site (sorry for the plug) for an example of a horizontal list menu.

HTH

-- 
Victor Engmark