Break Shovel and FBM's Website!

[Shovel]

For someone who posts in this forum rather a lot, and who tries to offer quite a bit of advice in the XHTML and CSS department, some may have wondered why I don't actually have a website of any real substance.

This is why: For about the past 3 years (on and off. Well, ok, "off") I've been developing version 2.0 of Students' Social. I'm still making a go of it though and therefore I've finally openned up the first beta.

http://beta.studentssocial.co.uk is the address in question. There're already some pretty chunkey showstopping bugs discovered, but it's pretty functional. Ish.

It's 100% CSS2 (with a little corrective JavaScript for our friend Internet Explorer). The layout is pure CSS, no tables at all. The graphics were done by both myself and FBM, and to be honest I'm really proud of what we've come out with appearence wise.

The backend is PHPNuke, severely reprimanded to output CSS-friendly content. It is this however the cause of the non-standards complience on the XHTML front. It was enough work just to get the output out of the table obsession let alone switching from HTML4 to XHTML. Again though, I'm pretty happy with the output I'm getting now.

I'm going to have 2 betas. This one (named "Jonty" as a thank you for all the coding help he's given me with this - heck, it's cheaper than a real present) is going to be bug ridden to hell and back, but we'll see what we can do with it There's a second beta which will hopefully fix all the bugs and introduce some new forums to replace the rickety aging YaBB forums that we've currently got.

So, there it is. Comments are very, very welcome.

 

[Krazeh]

How long did it take ya to get a good understanding of css2 and xhtml? I'm currently attempting to get my head round asp.net and as it's quite a change from classic asp i'm thinking I may as well get round to learning xhtml and css2 as well

 

[Shovel]

XHTML and CSS are extremely logical principals when you get down to it - especially for a programmer. With XHTML everything that relates to appearence and behavior gets offloaded to CSS (and Javascript). With a few exceptions (like the <b> and <i> tags) you end up with some raw content with structural markup (like <div>, <span>, <p>, <h#> etc) and the actual display is handled by the CSS.

 

[Tom]

Being REALLY picky here, but the smiley on the navigation bar is touching the edge of my screen. Could you indent it by a few pixels?

 

[mookie]

the blue gradient background, including the text (from "Review: Radiohead Live" down) seems to be repeated vertically on Safari 1.2 - OSX 10.3.2

 

[Maljonic]

Looks pretty nice to me.

 

[Shovel]

the blue gradient background, including the text (from "Review: Radiohead Live" down) seems to be repeated vertically on Safari 1.2 - OSX 10.3.2

Bugger. Safari is Gecko based isn't it? I'll have to check my CSS. When you say the text repeats as well, could you email me a screenshot? (If you've got the spare time of course matey!) Sounds like a very curious bug that.

I'm working on getting some markup to work having foolishly not tested any content with more than one line in it until the live testing today. Nothing has <br /> tags inserted. Rather laughable really.

 

[wyrd_fish]

teh pics for "find enteries" & "view profile" don't appear in the Colums / Weblogs page

 

[Shovel]

teh pics for "find enteries" & "view profile" don't appear in the Colums / Weblogs page

Yeah, they're not done yet

One of the reasons for going live was so we could both use it (I've done all the coding and had it live on my PC for a while). FBM has things like icon images on his "To-Do" list

 

[Krazeh]

What'd you use to get to grip with xhtml and css2? Books? Online references?

 

[Jonty]

What'd you use to get to grip with xhtml and css2? Books? Online references?

When I was first starting out I found W3Schools tutorials on XHTML, CSS and the like to be of great use, and many people have since echoed this. SitePoint, Webmonkey and A List Apart (often more advanced) also offer useful resources once you're into the swing of things. Naturally Google or the likes will also reveal a multitude of other helpful sites.

As for you, Ben, just a quick note to say thanks for the 'Jonty' beta of SS, very flattering I'm at university at the moment and the site is looking good on:

• Internet Explorer 5.5
• Windows 2000
• 16-bit colour

The only niggles - and they are niggles, nothing to worry about - are:

1. The background gradient 'bands' at 16-bit rather than smoothly transisting. For the same reason, the sidebar background doesn't quite blend with the CSS background colour for the sidebar. However, in my experience, this is very hard to fix without changing the colours, so I wouldn't worry too much (it still looks good even banded ). Indeed with the advent of Windows XP, more and more people are utilising 32-bit colour anyway, as it's the default setting where applicable (I think ). Apparently ~56% of people are now utilising 32-bit colour with ~33% in 16-bit, as opposed to ~55% 16-bit and ~28% 32-bit since October 2001 when XP was launched.
2. The radio buttons on the poll have a border around them, as per the submit button. I'm not sure if this is meant to be the case? (again, nothing major).
3. The background image for the articles is somewhat indistinguishable behind the text, although I'm guessing that's more to do with the length of the article, as your column, which has a fair amount of white space at the end, sets off the image very nicely indeed.

That's about it, really Keep up the good work!

Kind Regards

Jonty ... goes back to being away

 

[MYstIC G]

Layout wise it's a huge improvement over the original I feel. Personally although I didn't dislike the old site I did tend to find it a bit cluttered.

My only thought would be that you really need to find a way of moving the text away from being right up against the edges as it does make it difficult to read (think along the lines of printed pages have margins for a reason, kinda thing).

Other than that, it's all cool... Doh, then I go find something, how poor fs.

http://beta.studentssocial.co.uk/modules.php?name=Journal&file=search&bywhat=aid&forwhat=Ben

Needs a space after "1 comment"

 

[Shovel]

Thank you all

MG - that's on my bug list and you're not the only one to flag it up I'll toy around with different values when I've finished writing the markup regular expressions.

Thank you for the comments on the old site too I was 16 and knew sod all about HTML when I made that

 

[Athan]

See what I said in L_Plates' thread about setting a default text colour (sling it on the body bit in CSS).

-Ath

 

[Shovel]

See what I said in L_Plates' thread about setting a default text colour (sling it on the body bit in CSS).

-Ath

Thank you Ath. That one will be fixed with the next upload. There's a couple more bugs I'm tracking before I next upload, but that one will be live very soon

 

[Shovel]

Well, thanks for all your feedback.

I've uploaded a batch of fixes tonight, although adding the margins is the most visible my regular-expression-tastic markup function is working hard as well. There are some faults which need a lot of ironing, but they're fairly subtle so I'm going to tolerate it, rely on no-one else noticing (or trying to DOM <q> tags..) and patch it up when more pressing matters have been settled. I got Fatty to correct the grammar of the logo too.

Questions: Is the RHS bodytext margin wide enough? Is the logo (left hand) margin ok? And should I have the blue stripe poking out the other side of the logo like it is at the moment, or just coming "out of" the smily like it was before?

Mookie: Thanks for sending the screenshot, I don't know if you got my emailed reply, I think it tried to send it to a Barrysworld.com address. I've hunted out that Safari is Konquerer derived, which means there might be a small chance of testing it here (see if Cygwin's X is as awful as they say...). I've not tried to resolve it yet though.

Thanks all,

Ben