Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 6 January 2002

# 9:45 PM

Further cat-vacuuming

I've rewritten the markup of this web page to use cascading style sheets rather than the old hairy nested tables. It's a huge improvement, both in terms of how easy it is to write new entries, and how robust it is against browsers that don't understand the spiffy markup. For instance, the date and time markers are now called out by <h2> and <h3> tags, instead of being table cells. This makes far more structural sense, is easier to type, and if you shut off CSS entirely, it still looks halfway decent.

Having said that, it doesn't work quite the way I'd wanted. The most visually obvious problem is that the yellow block at the left is supposed to be a column as tall as the right column. I haven't found any way to do that. Also, the links have to appear in the source before the content. This is suboptimal for editing, and if you're here with a browser that doesn't do CSS, you have to scroll past the links to get to the content, which is annoying. Suggestions for improvements are welcome.