[IkimashoZ]

http://kambou.ikimashoz.com/ <-- Referring to here

This is the website that I did build from the ground up in XHTML strict, which I eventually ended up ditching for HTML4. I'm also running PHP on this site. Basically, there's a header.php, footer.php, index.php and various subsections which call all of those and a few other random functions I wrote. I've done bigger projects (web apps) with many more files, but for this one, I don't want thousands of stylesheets in the way. I want these three files. And that's it.

As per height -- this was my biggest annoyance during the whole XHTML process, everything else was stuff that could have been tidied up after the fact -- as you can see, I have a footer. On index.php, there is only the single kanji image at the center of the screen. My footer is at the bottom of the screen, and it is guaranteed to be at the bottom of the screen not matter what your screen resolution is.

Here are the options XHTML gave me:

1) The footer is directly below the kanji image is directly below the header. This is ugly. No.

2) I set a fixed height for the middle div. Well, I use 1024x768. What if you use a higher res? Or a lower res (god forbid)? Now the footer might be below the bottom of the screen or somewhere around 3/4 of the way down. This is also ugly.

3) set html height 100%, set body height 100%, set div height 100%... and I get a div that's in actuality about 150% of the screen. Come again??

This is when I rewrote the whole thing in HTML 4. My searches on google had produced some other ideas to try, but I really wasn't interested. A language designed for formatting should not have trouble filling the screen.

[DeveloperX]

[IkimashoZ]

Heh. Thanks.

Actually, my students just came in looking at my game and wanted to look at the website. I gave them the address and they wanted to know if it would work on thier cell phones because some of them don't have comps at home, since a Japanese cell phone can do pretty much everything they would do with a PC.

Well guess what, my own cell barfed up my website putridly, getting only the background right, so now I get to go back and look at XHMTL strict and figure out how this thing is supposed to work.

And btw, all my sites and games are in two places -- my HD and my external HD, which I love to death.

[Nodtveidt]

[IkimashoZ]

My site is now XHTML strict compliant. The site looks pretty good, too. Much like before. I'm still mad about that footer though.

[LeoDraco]

[RedSlash]

This is quite a big thread about XHTML vs HTML. I don't see why the huge debate over HTML4 vs XHTML. If people think HTML is going to go away and get replaced by XHTML, well its not going to happen anytime soon because HTML5 is being drafted right now.

Alot of web designers don't code in straight up HTML/XHTML anymore these days because coding with tags is very limited in terms of production and efficiency. Most web designer want to concentrate on building the graphics and getting the page layout to look nice without having to bother with the underlying code. Sites coded in straight up HTML/XHTML usually turns out to be really simplistic (mines included) because the authors spent more time on getting the coding correct rather than focusing on the design and visual appearance of the site.

Sure, use of HTML editors may generate not so nicely formatted code and maybe excess sometimes, but it will let you concentrate on your web design layout without worrying on getting the XHTML correct or making sure it displays properly across most browsers. So rather than saying that HTML4 is obsolete, I would say programming XHTML/HTML in textpad is obsolete (and I contradict myself in saying this because I code HTML in textpad too, but this is the reality that you learn when you enter the graphics design industry).

[tunginobi]

So you're the one working on the new game here? Good luck with that, I'm interested to see how that turns out.

The Flash thing was just a suggestion. I think it's possible to do the height centreing thing with JavaScript as well, but I haven't tried it myself.

As for the stylesheet thing, you can get away with inlining them, or putting them at the top of your pages, as well as making them externally linked.

I brought up DTP more to consider how people think about designing web pages. This is why I don't like WYSIWYG editors: they try to give you absolute control over something that's meant to be flexible enough to display well in different situations.


Does anybody else here like to draw their designs roughly on paper before they get into it, or is that just a "me" thing?

[Terry]

[BadMrBox]