Wayne wrote:
(...)
What that means is that to get it to look right on both, I've got to use both the td align tag AND the CSS, which both confuses the hell out of browsers AND makes for a slow site.
Wayne
This whole subject you raised made me think : The current site is a hell of a GOOD design : It looks good on Miggies AND on brand new iPhones running bleeding edge xhtml rendering engines..! Remind me again why is it that you want to change it ?
I'm kidding, I read all your related posts
At best, you're going to end up w/ a dual template, a table-based one for Amiga user-agents and a xhtml-kosher (Hallal, if you wish) one for everybody else... Drupal will let you direct your users to user-agenbt defined *themes* but this is a HELL to maintain, I predict.
Much better IMO would be to code the xhtml so semantically correctly that it would make sense even on CSS-impaired browsers, (top-middle-bottom, information flows - BTW table ARE admittable to display table-based content, like forum subject lists) but then A-Users would have to cope w/ the idea that the viewing experience is very different depending on the platform. This is what I would go for, but then again, I don't remember the last time I came here using iBrowse.. I'm going to install it now on UAE to check my latest designs.
One last thing : I REALLY like the current design. The masthead. The bullets. The icons. It's creative, Amiga-y, compact, easy on the eyes. The typographic convention, the color chart, this is lovingly crafted professional work.
If you're going to change it you might as well come with something better
And (this is my personal copyrighted content-protected opinion) the new mockup is nowhere near.
One side note : You should do your mockups in a drawing package, *much* simpler for you to adjust things based on feedback. If you don't know it yet may I suggest give
inkscape (veeery powerful & simple vector package, kinda like what we waited in vain to get on the Amiga, but I digress) a try, or directly in The
Gimp.
My point : If you're going to change anything, don't go for a table-based design with CSS hacks, because that's what we have now, and it works wonderfully, bravo. To code this way again *will* eventuelly break the upgrade path of all modern CMSes, and we'll have the same PB in 2, 4 years. Again.
Oh, and Drupal is an excellent choice AFAIC.
Thank you very much Wayne, you're doing a great job running this site.