Binary Bonsai

While it’s a relatively small part of the things that I write about here on Binary Bonsai that’s actually worth a revisit, some of entries nonetheless have a good deal of work in them. And perhaps even some thoughts or information of value to others. And it is with that in mind that I have added a new element to the sidebar, called Features. It’s purpose is to point interested visitors towards some of the older ‘substantial’ entries.

Normally it would rotate through a range of links randomly, but it seems quite stuck on one at the moment which I’m putting down to an error somewhere in the code of WordPress. It should start rotating eventually though. I however will be gone probably all day saturday. In the meanwhile you can play around with the new archive links placed at strategic places throughout the sidebar.

This commentary was written partially as a response to a comment about Suspended Animation, an article by David Koenig and partially because I’ve wanted to talk a little bit about this for a while now.

Like most other people today I grew up watching animation shorts and Disney features. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh; characters that today have become entire institutions in and by themselves. And even today they still hold a special place in most people’s hearts, if for nothing else then for nostalgia. The company that unquestionably laid the tracks for the animation genre is no longer the innovative mouse it started out as. Rather it has grown into a lumbering colossus of uninspired management, cheap rehashes and sequels, paint-by-numbers animation features and stockholder satisfaction.

After my little rant yesterday I decided none the less to try my hand at the implementation of a no-tables-for-support layout once again. This time around it seems to work quite well, though time will tell if any reports about compatibility issues reach my ears in the near future. This once again entitles me to use this:

Update: This will never end! I discovered a few glitches caused by the use of a div based layout that I decided were unbearable to live with. As a result I’m now back to a single 2 celled table which holds the content and sidebar where they’re supposed to be… I feel dirty ;)

There is a sense of achievement and enjoyment in executing an idea with surgical precision through the use of entirely standards compliant XHTML and CSS.

Because of this, it annoys me even more that the current layout has to rely on tables as a crutch. A two rowed table with a 1, 2 cell configuration, one of the most basic of support tables and yet sorely needed due to something as banal as a one-pixel calculation error in IE’s parsing/rendering engine.

There will be contrasting views on this, but the way I see it the advancement of markup languages and the subsequent deprecation of old standards such as center shouldn’t actually make it harder for any author of websites to produce an end result. Nonetheless that is the current state of affairs if one is to look at the recommendations set forth by W3C.

Tables for instance were never meant to be used as layout tools, but as containers for data (such as the table in the sidebar). But lacking better tools it was picked up and used as a layout tool back in the day. And trying to reestablish the correct use of tags element positioning was brought in to take the place of the table.

But with browsers still engaged in petty skirmishes, or perhaps rather not engaged as is the case with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, these things happen ever so slowly if at all. For this reason alone (and not counting such innovative features as tabbed browsing) it is worth shouting out the gospel of such browsers as Firebird which miraculously manages to stay within the restrictions of modern standards even without passing the 1.0 release version yet!

The need for cross-browser compatibility has placed ‘proper’ technique on the sacrificial alter and set me back a step in the fight for standards adaptation.

Burn in Hell Microsoft… :)

Worth reading on the subject: A List Apart’s Pratical CSS Layout, Kottke’s “Standards don’t necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct” (which is in my opinion only partially true) and of course last but by no means least W3C’s XHTML 1.0 recommendation.