the CSS Zen Garden

[Lifestyle_X]

Ever heard of it ? What do you think of it ?

[lo0m]

i'm searching for new ideas/solutions there and on similar sites from time to time... especially when i have a problem with ie and it's buggy css..

[Lifestyle_X]

Solutions ? Why search them there, what kind of problems are you having with your css and IE ?

I have to make a zengarden for school, has to be finished in 2 weeks.

[lo0m]

not that it has to be THIS site, but "gardens" are usually well coded.. it can really be any site if I remember that there might be the solution to the problem I'm facing

IE: i wish i could stop supporting ie in my designs, but hey - that's a part of my job. floats, margins and z-indexes drives me mad.. or the way IE renders them.. and transp PNGs in IE6

[Lifestyle_X]

Yeah, IE6 is the big bitch.

[Lifestyle_X]

If anyone's curious, here's my garden : http://student.devine.be/david.van.steenberge/

feedback is welcome, I can still change stuff.
Maybe gonna make a new design tomorrow.

[lo0m]

hey i like that. i like how only the main element scrolls and the rest remains intact. But - what about people with smaller screens? people with 800x600 resolution (or the netbook favorite 800x480 i think) won't be able to read the paragraphs on the right. I would also center the whole page so that people with those wide 30" screens would have the page in center rather than on the left of their screens.. just my 2 cents :-)

[Lifestyle_X]

Assignment is minimum 1024x768, but still I have a problem.. need to fix that.
And you're right about the centering, would be better, thx for feedback !!

[Sean The Red]

I like your garden. I've been doing front end web work for a couple years now on a part to full time basis depending on how much work is available at any given time. These are some of my observations are the issues you've been discussing are this:

Fuck IE6. Seriously... beyond minimum functionality and layout, don't bother. Extensive debugging of IE6 is a bad business decision for you and your client. As of last month it has a 10.2% market share, and with the release of Windows 7, that figure will be plummeting. So long as web designers & developers continue to hold the hand of the idiots who haven't gotten around upgrading, they won't. Developing for IE6 takes a disproportionate amount of time and resources as well. If you look at it from a cost benefit perspective, it is only slightly above burning a pile of money or dumping it in a pit.

As far as monitor resolution is concerned, this goes back to the IE6 thing, so few people have monitors at that resolution, don't worry. For user experience, the biggest issue is readability. This is easy to tackle: LARGER FONT SIZE. 14px is the new 12px. As resolution goes up, the relative size on the screen that 12px takes up decreases. Where 12px was easy to read before, now it is too small for the average user.

Always center your pages, and break that rule when you feel like you should.

Use a PC to develop and do your initial debug, and then finalize it with a mac. Use Firefox + firebug to code efficiently, then go to google chrome to be able "inspect element" in a WebKit environment (should cover safari nicely), and then bump on over to IE.

Always remember the 80-20 rule, and make wise business decisions when it comes to IE bugs.

Forget everything negative I've said about IE6 if: you are dealing with a deep pockets client OR you are dealing with a site that is geared to the retiree community. They are old, blind and confused. Their computer could easily be from a decade ago, consider them technically disabled, IE6 is your version of the Wheelchair ramp.

[Lifestyle_X]

I like your garden.

Too bad the teachers think it's total crap.


I've been doing front end web work for a couple years now on a part to full time basis depending on how much work is available at any given time. These are some of my observations are the issues you've been discussing are this:

Fuck IE6. Seriously... beyond minimum functionality and layout, don't bother. Extensive debugging of IE6 is a bad business decision for you and your client. As of last month it has a 10.2% market share, and with the release of Windows 7, that figure will be plummeting. So long as web designers & developers continue to hold the hand of the idiots who haven't gotten around upgrading, they won't. Developing for IE6 takes a disproportionate amount of time and resources as well. If you look at it from a cost benefit perspective, it is only slightly above burning a pile of money or dumping it in a pit.

As far as monitor resolution is concerned, this goes back to the IE6 thing, so few people have monitors at that resolution, don't worry. For user experience, the biggest issue is readability. This is easy to tackle: LARGER FONT SIZE. 14px is the new 12px. As resolution goes up, the relative size on the screen that 12px takes up decreases. Where 12px was easy to read before, now it is too small for the average user.

Always center your pages, and break that rule when you feel like you should.

Use a PC to develop and do your initial debug, and then finalize it with a mac. Use Firefox + firebug to code efficiently, then go to google chrome to be able "inspect element" in a WebKit environment (should cover safari nicely), and then bump on over to IE.

Always remember the 80-20 rule, and make wise business decisions when it comes to IE bugs.

Forget everything negative I've said about IE6 if: you are dealing with a deep pockets client OR you are dealing with a site that is geared to the retiree community. They are old, blind and confused. Their computer could easily be from a decade ago, consider them technically disabled, IE6 is your version of the Wheelchair ramp.

Like you say !

[Sean The Red]

Too bad the teachers think it's total crap.



Like you say !

That is because they don't do it for a living, their job isn't to find solutions to for people. Their job is to make up bull shit problems for people to solve. If they are teaching you about IE6 it is a waste of your time and theirs because by the time you are out in the field, it will be gone for good.

Your best bet is to never ever take another class with regard to website design. Take graphic design classes, and computer science classes. Make sure you learn JS and PHP. Once you have those skills, you can learn everything you need to on the fly. Not a week goes by that I don't run into a situation where I don't know the answer. Good Google query skills are far more useful than retaining a bunch of knowledge about browser hacks.

Oh, and if you want to see really amazing CSS work, check out the US Army's sites. Their work is so clean it is astonishing.

[Lifestyle_X]

It's a good school. They just make us aware of IE6, it's problems and the hacks for it.
This was in the class of graphics design, they really didn't like the design of the garden.
We're gonna learn JS and PHP next semester in Dynamic Web.

[lo0m]

Hey Sean, thanks for posting your tools of trade.. Firebug is great and I use it often. What i don't understand well is "finalize it with a mac". what's the big difference i don't see between a Win/Linux PC and a Mac?