Metaly fled!

Sunday, September 7, 2003 » general update webdesign

Well, here it is: The brand new Webpage experience, powered in part by Movable Type. As you'll notice, the main entries area now features categorized archives, a search tool (to scan said archives), and commenting. It's all very exciting. To me, anyway. But then again, I'm the type of person who reads books on CSS in bed.

To avoid putting everyone to sleep, I'll probably limit my talk of MovableType to that introduction. The other little details about the new page I will discuss briefly further on. However, there is one major issue that I am going to discuss, even though you'll probably not care about it. You should still read it because it is important and I plan to get preachy. The bottom line, though, is that I am going to ask you to (probably) switch your Web browser, so if you're adamant about not doing that, you may skip the next several paragraphs.

Here we go. I really enjoy this new design, which is made possible by the wonder that is CSS. However, to best enjoy it, you will need a CSS-compliant browser. Primarily this means: Not Internet Explorer. I know that Microsoft was generous enough to meld IE into the operating systems that upwards of 90% of Internet users run, so it's probably a convenience thing for most people. However, an interesting little fact about IE is that it is actually designed to be non-compliant to Web standards such as CSS and HTML. Standards, as in the rules that dictate how CSS and HTML markup works and how browsers should display Websites. A good Webpage author should write HTML/CSS that conforms to these standards so it can be correctly interpreted by browsers, much like you use punctuation when you write so people can tell what it is you're saying. Anyway. Microsoft basically designed IE to accomodate sloppily-written HTML to be compatible with a larger number of pages. Yes, that's very kind of them, but it really just perpetuates poor Web design as designers slack off because they figure it'll only trip up the roughly 6% of users with standards-compliant browsers. (I will spare you from any scathing analogies.)

So, as a frustrated Web designer and strong supporter of CSS, I urge you to at least try out one of the fine offerings from Mozilla.org, namely Firebird. If you're on OS X like myself, there's the popular Safari, although it's not as compliant as Mozilla's Camino. (I tend to switch between the two.) And by the way, all three of these browsers are much faster than Internet Explorer.

So, sorry to rant, but it seriously disturbs me that Microsoft, monopolies and the Xbox aside, would do something that so surreptitiously undermines progress in a developing technology like the Web.

On top of all that, they're causing IE users to miss out on the crazy text effects on the links page!

Well, that was much longer than I expected. In case you've gotten lost, I was trying to (briefly) give a runthrough of new page features. There aren't too many, I suppose, besides the lovely Metaly-centric design. I did revamp the links a bit, and there's a new feature (back by popular demand), so you can go take a look at those. Otherwise, I'll probably wrap this up now and save all the reviewing I was going to do for another time.

So, yes. That's about it for now.