AKMA drinks the CSS Kool-Aid
Following either her natural altruistic impulses or the lure of a tenured full professorship (in linguistics) at the University of Blogaria, Dorothea Salo is re-engineering AKMA’s Blogger template:
Your current blog template, AKMA, is set up as one big giganto-table, with several smaller tables inside. This is a time-honored HTML technique which came about in the first place because it was the only way to do anything vaguely resembling a complex liquid layout on the Web.
Unfortunately, this technique suffers from several drawbacks, including lousy accessibility, tag abuse (tables ought to present data that make sense as tables, not be a layout device), and worst of all from your perspective, truly terrible human-readability of the underlying HTML. You played with your template—was it easy? I can’t imagine it was. Following layout-table code gives me headaches.
What Dorothea fails to mention—throughout her admirably lucid explanation of how to convert masses of inefficient table code to five elegant DIV tags—is that she has proffered (and AKMA has perhaps unwittingly imbibed) a chalice filled with CSS Kool-Aid.
While our attention is focused on AKMA, Dorothea should be aware that Mark Pilgrim has his eye on her.
Fortunately AKMA’s inevitable induction into the CSS Fellowship should not pose any threat to his Christian convictions, since the Fraternal Society of CSS Practitioners—like Freemasonry—does not in any way “cross the boundaries of religious belief.”
As if Dorothea’s grasp of the intricacies of CSS positioning was not sufficiently impressive, she commands my deepest respect by mentioning Kinesis keyboards. I’ve used Microsoft Natural Keyboards for the last five years but I’m unhappy with the feel of my current Natural Keyboard Pro. I’ve been on the brink of ordering an IBM 42H1292 keyboard, but I’ll hold off until Dorothea posts a review of her new Kinesis keyboard.
I’m curious about how she decided between the Contoured, Maxim, and Evolution models. I’ll be buying my Kinesis keyboard from DMB Ergonomics too, rather than from the manufacturer who, inexplicably, doesn’t accept credit cards from international customers.
My wife and I have been using Kinesis keyboards for close to 7 years. I have bought all of mine from David Bialick at http://dmb-ergonomics.com/. You won't regret buying your keyboard there.
Not only are they great keyboards for ergonomics, but they're built like a tank. When I got my first one, I couldn't afford to have one at work and one at home (forget getting my employer to buy one) so I carted the keyboard back and forth in my backpack. I'm still using that same keyboard today, nearly 7 years later.
Posted by: Tommy Williams on 13 May 2002 at 09:00 AM