Re: HEADS UP: Website Overhaul

[Dave Cuthbert <dacut@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gary Thorpe wrote:
> David Cuthbert wrote:
> > Personally, I limit myself to simple tables and font styles.  Oh, I
> > know about the advantages of CSS and such; but preprocessed HTML works
> > much more reliably.
>
> Using tables to format text is bad style and the ugliest but most 
> popular hack on the internet. It doesn't "look" that fancy when you have 
> to use a text browser (instead of the memory gobbling mozilla).

What should one use, then?  Frames?  Divs?  Neither of those look all 
that great in lynx, either.

> And if you seperate the style from the content, it will be easier to 
> maintain: will it be easier to go through and edit a dozen documents 
> that have particular fonts or edit the one stylesheet they all included 
> for the same look and feel?

Easier to keep the document separate from HTML completely and preprocess 
it, bypassing buggy CSS implementations completely.

> > Of late, I've even foregone much of that, limiting myself to Wikis and,
> > when a Wiki isn't available, wrapping everything in <pre> tags (see
> > http://www.kanga-da.org/ for example).
>
> This is dirt simple to do in standard HTML and you won't have to rely 
> and manually inserting tabs/spaces: the layout cannot be that crucial 
> anyway.

Yeah, but manually inserting tabs/spaces becomes almost WYSIWYG in 
emacs. :-)

The layout is crucical.  It's impossible to read prose, especially when 
interspersed with bits of code, when you don't have appropriate 
paragraph breaks and indentation.  I got a readable layout on the first 
try, rather than mucking around with HTML, saving, loading in three 
different browsers to see what bugs the HTML exposes, editing, saving, ...

Nor do I have to worry about overly long lines.

And it's viewable in lynx, too!  Heck, it almost looks the same in lynx 
as Mozilla!