The New SP Design is Up!

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WOW that is a brand new beautifull face. Cool allthough it took a long time to bring it up Tal it was well worth it

 

@Gopher:

100% viewport, you mean? Or 100% parent height for non-block child elements. Div nesting doesn't work in W3C DTDs and therefore there's no such thing as child divs having 100% of parent div's height. Three column layout is doable in CSS so long as the columns don't need to be of the same height, unless: 1) you have it all in fixed positions 2) all of it is contained with 100% viewport whereby the problem doesn't exist. To synchronise dimensions of objects is impossible without tables.

Certain things will not work in CSS alone and that's where tables come useful. Tables are still valid elements even in XHTML Strict.

That they don't work in certain browsers is a secondary concern. What's more, there are more browsers that screw up styles than those that screw up tables.

Of course, certain tags (like H1 to H7) aren't allowed in TD's, but hey, that's why <p>'s and spans have configurable font sizes and all.

@Rogue Paladin:

"CSS three column 100% height all the way down problem" as your loooong keyword should do

There's no problem with three column layout so long as the height is a specified number of pixels or a percentile value or whatever such. However, it's impossible to have, for instance, background containers stretch to wrap around text. It's impossible to have what I have at http://www.chevalier.szm.com with CSS alone so long as the W3C DTD is specified. If you use a short Doctype definition without the full reference to W3C's DTDs, it will work in most browsers thanks to DIV nesting - one column is BODY showing, another has a big margin-left and another's child div has a big margin-right as well, therefore giving you three layers. Fixed header and footer with float:left and float:right corner graphics finish the job. But it won't work in properly W3C compliant code.

 

It's perfectly doable...

Header uses background image in a div to do the top, footer for the bottom and a main background div with repeated-down graphic as the border.

Anyway, this discussion is way off topic.

 

I go away for four days and this happens!

I was in shock when the first page had loaded. The good kind of shock though. It's still somewhat unfamiliar, but it looks much better and much more professional than the last design.

Good work, tal!

 

Only in a fixed width. Otherwise it won't work. I might create some sites with a fixed width - after all, it really has some significant advantages, but sometimes, when a site is text intense and devoid of fancy graphics, I prefer to have it scale to the user's resolution - be it the standard (for websites) 800*600, or the on-the-rise standard 1024*768, or whatever bizarre thing such as 3456*864 or the old 640*480 (I have a large share of visitors with uncommon resolutions on that site). No matter how you put it, tables are still better for some tasks than CSS. With whatever resolution you view my site, or SP, the border will still work properly, placing itself on the edges as it should. CSS won't make it.

The current SP design is one of such examples. The problem is the same as with my site - there's no way to achieve the same effect with divs and CSS without forcing a specific resolution. Specific resolutions suck for anything else than portal layout a la PHP nuke and the like - with no border and just floating menus on either side of the middle text container. SP is not one of such sites, however.

 

One thing that I thought was a little funny is the "Help Wanted" graphic is in the Diablo font.

Looks purty sweet there Tal.

 

Very nice.

 

Nice work, Tal.

 

As I said at RB I love this new layout! Great work!

 

I like the new look. It's colorful but easy on my eyes. You do a good job Tal.

 

I can't get the Friendly Arms Inn links to Top Talkers, Who's Online, and Channel Stats to work.

 

This page from Apple about Safari's CSS support might be helpful in tracking down what might be the root of the problem. If you're using an unsupported CSS selector in Safari, then maybe there is an easy alternative or if there is no alternative, then at least you'll know exactly what the problem is and we can send in a bug report to Apple so they will add support for that in the next version of Safari.

I really would appreciate it if you didn't write off Safari as a browser not to code for, even if it's difficult for you to do live testing. I'm sure there are enough Mac folks and enough support on the web for you to at least know what the problem is and yell at Apple that it's making you look bad, because a lot of people visiting who are using Safari won't know why it doesn't look good and will blame you, even though it's not your fault.

That's not fair, so we should make sure we point out to Apple that they're lack of support for some CSS is making you look bad to Safari users. If enough people submit bugs, they'll fix it.


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Ah, no wonder it doesn't work in Safari.

The page can't be validated by the W3C Validator. Looking at the source, I couldn't even begin to help with this. Not that it's written poorly, I'm sure you did a fine job, just that it's not based on any standard that I even kinda understand,

From looking at the source, it looks like you are using nested tables (I didn't look that closely, though, but there are a lot of tables) and I'm guessing that the tables for the sidebars are missing something that Safari expects to be there. I would look into it more, but I don't have time to do the things I'm supposed to be doing and I'm not even sure why I'm writing this because it's only going to get me into trouble.

And the last thing I need is more trouble in my life.

Anyway, usually if the W3C Validator fails on a page, it means it's not going to render in someone's browser and so you were coding and looking at browsers and seeing if it looked okay. That's understandable. I do that. I don't think our site validates (for different reasons, but our site definitely doesn't validate).

Validation is good, though. Someday I'll go through and get our site to validate. Then it's a lot easier to blame a browser for poor support. As it is, one can't really blame Safari for it. Safari will render pages that validate, unless they use CSS that isn't supported by Safari, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

I should shut up now.

[ July 29, 2004, 02:26: Message edited by: Hanna ]

 

Been cruisin' around, checking out the new design for the past few days.

Looks good. Two thumbs up to all involved, (Tal and Catbert are the only two I know of that were involved).

 

I likee!! I'm only workin part-time now, once i get a full-timer i think i may look into becoming a donater to your site, which i have always said is THE best site for CRPGin' and D&D whatnots. I hope i never have to go that long without a SP fix again. Tal, Berenator, etc. keep up the excellent work!