http://branches.asce.org/huntsville

Hello, everyone! I posted my site here a few weeks ago, and was told that I should look into CSS, because my site was designed using tables. Well, I've since done exactly that, and I'd like to see what you all think of it so far:

New CSS Design

I also added some buttons to the right in the CSS design. I know there is still work to do on it, but I've come a long way, I think.

I'd like to know what you all think of the new design as far as code and color scheme. I also have one very specific problem with it. I ended up having to keep the table that formats the menu on the left, because I couldn't figure out how to code that with just html and CSS, without having whitespace between the pics. If anyone can help with that, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Hey that's looking really good if you ask me. I like the colour scheme - classy. There's some oddness happening in Firefox 1.0 on this iMac with stuff not aligning down the right hand sides - haven't got time to look into it sorry. You need a doctype at the top of your document and make sure you validate. You are validating right?

Thanks, SkyRocket. I do plan to validate. The CSS conversion is still in it's infancy right now. I plan to work on it some more and eventually validate it. I'm just a Civil Engineer, so I'm kind of in over my head here, but I'm learning by leaps and bounds and loving every minute of it.

Hopefully soon, I'll have the whole site converted to CSS.

That's weird. I validated my HTML, and now the site is all funny looking. All I had to do for validation was add some alts in the img tags. I guess I still need to validate the CSS. We'll see how that goes. I'm working on it.

My site is officially validated and fixed.

The css design is pretty sweet-loking. Nice work.

Thank you very much, Markisdee. I appreciate that. As I said before, I was inspired by everyone here to convert to CSS, and I worked real hard at it.

Good work - looks better. The boxes/divs all line up now down their right sides (in my browser).

code the menu as a list, i.e. ul and li tags, then use your new found css skills to style it as you wish, i would suggest not using images for a menu as this is the height of inaccessibility. Instead just use text links, then put your rocket as the background (using css of course) to a div containing the menu.

Thanks, Three. I'll try working on that next. I would love to get rid of that last table.

Now that I'm valid HTML 4.01 Transitional, should I go for HTML Strict or XHTML 1.0? Or should I just be satisfied with what I've got?

Whichever doctype your using, that's which one.

Or you could push it up to xHTML 1.1 if you really want to.

(x)HTML 1.1 is not advisable, the majority of browsers used do not support it because of it's stated mimetype i.e. 'application/xhtml+xml' (by this i mean m$ie doesn't support it, even with sp2 it's still buggy)

Personally I code to (x)HTML 1.0 Strict, for no real reason, I might as well code to HTML 4.01 Strict but I think the (x) makes it sound more exciting , more seriously, coding in (x)HTML makes the code more flexible and perhaps longer lived, as it can be manipulated by an XML parser, but to folk like me It makes no real difference.

However, if you're a real speed freak, the I've heard it said that semantic HTML is ever so slightly quicker to render that (x)HTML.

There are a lot of different opinions on this including some i haven't even touched on, because i can't be bothered sitting here tapping away for 30mins, if we're lucky some of these other opinions might get aired shortly....

Well I do the ultimate stupid thing, to which there is no point what so ever, I use a 1.1 doctype with a html mime type. I could if I really cared enough, change the mime type according to which browser requests it but that counts as going out of my way for m$ie, not good.

I agree though, the x does make things a lot more exciting. Maybe the pointone does that as well.

isn't serving (x)html 1.1 with the improper mime type to get it to work in m$ie just the same thing, if i were being particularly ideological i would serve as using the proper mime type and screw m$ie, but instead i decided that it was better to adopt the approach of 'appropriate standards', for example:

as much as i like the potential of svg, it's not supported, so i don't use it...

thats probably a bad example but i hope you get my point anyway.