Regarding my post from Friday night/Saturday morning… if you are just now reading the site, post-skins, the “default” skin is Netscape 4 friendly. It is not perfect in Netscape 4, but it works. On the other hand, for those of you that have upgraded your browsers within the past year, I now offer new compliant skins that break in Netscape 4. I will warn you on the skins page if I know it doesn’t display properly in a certian browser. I was asked by a wise man why I would want to design a site that I know won’t work in ancient browsers. I posted this in the comments on the earlier post, but I figured I would share my thoughts here too:
1. I did a skin that looks bad in old browsers because (a) I wanted to do an ALL CSS layout, no tables, just so I could say I did it and (b) I knew I was setting up skins, so people with old browsers wouldn’t be locked out. CSS Layout courtesy of BlueRobot tweaked with hours of patience and beating my head against a wall. It renders faster and is closer to being compliant. (I still have a few errors to fix, but I will get to that soon.)
2. New browsers have been out for a looooong time now. Sorry, I am not going to design for ancient browsers. That’s insane. It is time for me to learn new things. Upgrade, get compliant. 🙂 If you want to read more on that rant, go to The Web Standards Project. I will always offer 1-2 “old Netscape” skins, and the rest of us can see lots of pretty designs that might not work in old browsers. Sorry.
3. I did, however, make sure I provided at least one “old Netscape” skin initially so that Kymberlie wouldn’t complain. I also intentionally set it as the default skin for the site so that everybody else that was entering for the first time would see a skin that worked cross-platform.
But please change the skin. Make me feel good. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent working on it, not to mention everyone’s help and the wealth of knowledge that Amy provided. It took her 6 months to figure it out. It took me a day & a half, plus another day to get the site set up to use stylesheets correctly.
If you have tried to e-mail me, it seems I forgot to pay the cable bill. Ooops. Check is in the envelope in my dayplanner, never mailed. So e-mail earlier than 2pm CST bounced. Ruhrooo… Fixed it though, and E-mail should be tweaked by this afternoon, but I will be offline tonight unless I can get dial-up access set up. Know what that means though? More time to create more skins! (Waiting on the tech guru to fix my graphics software… so the skins may be more CSS fun until then!)
