[GLLUG] Off Topic - Please, HTML/CSS problem, any help?

[Richard Houser]

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Sorry for the length.  As I mentioned, I do this stuff for a living, so
I've seen all the same problems elsewhere.  Feel free to ignore anything
I said

> An external style sheet was my original intention.  I don't know enough about all this to do it right I suppose.  I guess it would be like my individual poems which include a link to a style sheet.  I would just copy out all the stuff b/w <style> and </style> and then put that in it's own file with a reference.

That's the bulk of it.  The remainder is just moving the style
attributes (not tags) from the other items into the main stylesheet once
you move the style blocks.  For those, you just need to figure out the
proper selector that matches what you need to style with those rules.
It's not hard, and you should be well on your way in 5min.  Overall,
extremely minimal change.

> As for the extensions, that's probably good advice except I don't even plan on using PHP or anything else.  My original thought was a purely text page but then I thought a minimalist interface would be nice ( I like fluxbox and keeping things simple.)  I didn't use and Java and didn't want to.   I thought it should all be able to be done in a text editor with CSS.  

Nobody ever plans on breaking links on a tech change, but it happens,
and happens a lot.  As soon as you want to add anything dynamic, you are
looking at SSI, php, jsp, asp, etc, and that would break your existing
links, etc.  It's just another form of future proofing that you should
try to provide.  The only reasonable situation I've came across for not
doing this so far was on a really low power webserver that couldn't run
something like apache reasonably well (ie. my linksys wrt54g
router/webserver).

> It was a learning experience for me.  The website I designed for the company I work for, I designed using Dreamweaver.  I know now, from looking at the source, that it is all backwards.  Dreamweaver just kept creating new styles every time I changed a font or text at all.  I would like to clean that up to but there is no time.

It's a learning experience for us all, even those of us that have been
doing it for years.  More often or not at that point, it's an issue
about getting around the latest IE bug conflict.  Luckily, all the other
browsers mostly just behave :).  Anyhow, on the Dreamweaver front, I
despise the program, but I hear the current versions aren't anywhere
near as bad as before (and almost worth using for non-expert users).

> Is there a web based CSS checker?  That is what I was looking for when I found the other tests, which my site passed.

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/, but the link is on the w3.org main
site as well.

> All in all I like the way it turned out.  I have only gotten one piece of of feedback so far and that person liked the site.

Glad to hear.  An audience should also provide the encouragement to keep
up the learning too :).  Give it time, and you will probably be writing
small dynamic applications (it's just baby-steps all the way in, there
is no big hurdle for any given part).
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