There are a lot of beautiful and clever things you can do with CSS but, because of poor support in the browser that most people use, some of these things require that you insert DIV elements in markup that serve no purpose but to be a container that style can be applied to. The Piefecta Layout hack for example, while clever, results in markup cluttered with almost as many meaningless tags as layout tables. Many of the fancier designs at the CSS Zen Garden require the same level of div-ery. This is not what I’m looking for.
Jay has asked me to update the style of my site. He’s sick of my mild variation on FrontPage’s zero theme. I have to agree with him. Once, back in 1999 when only IE5.5 and Opera 3 supported CSS with any seriousness and Moz 1 and Mac IE5 where just fevered dreams, it was futuristic. I’ve only made slight changes to my site layout ever since. I’m long overdue for style update.
But because I don’t want to insert a bunch of meaningless markup into my pages, this limits how stunning my new design will be. Plus I don’t have the best image manipulation and generation programs in the world. Mostly I’ve been focusing on what sort background I’ll have for the masthead. I have done some research on fonts that look good and are commonly installed on most Linux boxes, so the typography shouldn’t look too shabby. I’ve decided to move to a two column layout with the content on the left and all internal navigation, save my accessibility bar, on the right. My markup is ordered so content comes first. This means I have to do a lot of positioning in CSS to make things look like they aren’t ordered that way. This another limitation which is compounded by poor support in the browser that most people use.
So I may end up with something that looks pretty bland.