website design.

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

James, much of the technical snafus you raise can be overcome. Sorry if
some of this comes out grumpy; I probably shouldn't have even brought up
the issue of style, because I have ideas myself, especially on
implementation.

  * the static formatting of text to fit a particular width: why do we
need to do this?  Normal HTML flows to fit any width.  The only exception
is on pages with pictures that are larger than the screen size, which will
need to be scrolled.

  * font issue.  I plan to take the documents and strip them of all <font>
and <size> commands, replacing them with paragraph classes.  A master
style sheet will specify the fonts used by each type of paragraph.  Style
sheets allow a graceful prioritization of fonts.  For instance, I can say
"for normal paragraphs, try Mikrosoft-Uber, Times-Roman, or any serifed
font, in that order.  Style sheets work under both IE and Netscape. ( I
really hate telling people they have to go to a web site and download some
plugin or font just to make the site look good, so I will be doing my
darndest to create HTML code that looks sharp on new browsers but doesn't
look like crap on non-MS.  Take a look at
http://lists.thekrib.com/aga-contest/mocksite-linux.jpg to see what I see
on my main machine when I pull the contest page.  It does not have to be
like this!)

  * Likewise, I don't think there's a need to tell people how to set their
monitor or adapter for 24-bit graphics. That's for tech support.  The
pictures will be in JPEG format, which is standard elsewhere on the web.
I liken this sort of thing to telling people that clicking on the blue
highlighted words takes them to a link.


What I'm sort of getting at with the "design" issue is just that I'd like
us to discuss a particular "look" in mind for me to code to, and I will
code it using the methods I know best. Things like "static nav bar on the
left (or better yet, the top)", "paragraphs right justified, no ident",
"simple, not cluttered" and font info are very helpful here.

Perhaps I will just put together something based on the look of the mock
site, and see how that goes.  There will be time for review of everything
before it goes online.

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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