Progressing— Slowly
After writing some more content, settled on a basic design of two columns – main content on the left, subsidiary content, references etc. on the right. Minimum width in EMs to make the page usable, and maximum widths on the content of each column to keep a sane amount of measure or line length.
Flexible Web Pages
Support for media queries is getting to be good, so capable browsers get three columns on a wide window, and a single column on narrow ones. This began as an exercise in designing for the iPhone, but I found it so simple to create these alternative styles in “pure” CSS that I went for broke.
Media queries currently work in Chrome 1.0+, Firefox 3.5, Safari 3.0+, and Opera since version 7 (2004). Microsoft is MIA.
With a bit more content written and a print style added, I’ll be ready to convert the static markup to work in Textpattern. That should be a challenge fun.
HTML 5 and CSS 3
Another design decision I faced was whether to use HTML 5 markup. Since older browsers won’t recognize the new tags, and Internet Explorer needs some scripting to make it comply, I decided against. Instead, I am using class names that correspond to the new tags, so converting later should be a breeze.
So many features of CSS 3 have good support, with unobtrusive fallback in less capable browsers, that I use them quite a lot. One fallback would be no CSS drop shadows, for example – hardly show-stopping. Using graphics for rounded corners and drop shadows seems so unnecessary these days. Internet Explorer has various filters that can emulate these things, too, although I’ll be using JavaScript to apply these proprietary properties.
More later…
