Building A Website

[commodorejohn]

As they say, testing's going to be a bigger problem than development. (You shouldn't do web development with layout tools anyway, it encourages bloat and layout-centric design. But then, I'm kind of a cranky old man when it comes to web design anyway.) A solid programmer's text editor and FTP client will do perfectly fine for authoring and uploading.

[commodorejohn]

C'mon.  Nobody in their right mind is going to ditch Dreamweaver to create websites strictly with a text editor, unless they have masochistic tendencies *and* far too much free time on their hands.

My site was made in probably 40 hours in Programmer's Notepad with QuickPHP for script testing and different versions of Firefox for CSS testing, and that's counting the time I spent on W3Schools learning CSS. I'll lay a six-pack on the line that says that it comes in lighter than an equivalent site built in any layout tool you care to name, and another if it should, as I suspect, also be more broadly compatible.

[commodorejohn]

It amuses me how modern web designers react to tables like vampires to crucifixes

[commodorejohn]

Using tables takes extra typing, and provides much less flexibility in CSS; primarily because those elements (THEAD, TBODY, TR, TD) are less susceptible to styling.

The same or a more flexible layout can be had with a couple of DIVs or SPANs in combination with CSS. Even using display: table|table-cell on non table elements can be more flexible and enjoyable than coding up a bunch of behemoth table elements.

That's a fair point from a "how to approach a new design" perspective, but I still don't quite get the horror with which tables in existing sites are reacted to...

[commodorejohn]

That's perhaps because you aren't visually impaired. Proper site design, in which the logical structure of the document comes first and layout is achieved purely via CSS produces pages that are far more accessible to Braille output devices and other non-visual browsers.

Really? I'd have thought that tables, properly applied (and by "properly applied" I mean "used to organize tables of information, and not as a poor man's layout tool,") would if anything be an aid to specialty readers...

[commodorejohn]

The thing i hate the most on webpages are the abuse of javascript, that is the tendency from years till now. I have seen pages that had an insanely amount of library and script calls, only to show an image or piece of text. Javascript is one thing that is needed too drop, for better browsing and security.

Ugh, yes. Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to drop it completely, as there are some legitimate uses for in-browser scripting, but it's so widely and horribly abused that the only way I can browse the web without wanting to pull my hair out is to use NoScript and unblock only the sites where I have no choice but to allow it...

@commodorejohn

Checked your page and liked the simple, but completely functional layout. I liked it!

Thanks I tried to come up with something minimalist, my previous attempt was a bit of a mess. I figured, if it renders usably in Links, it's probably a passable design...