Andreas08 theme released

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Thu Mar 02, 2006 9:54 pm

I have finally released Andreas08. I am really sorry about the delay. In the last few days I've really done a lot of work on this theme, and unfortunately the drop down menu had to go. At this stage they are just too complex to include in a publicly available theme.

I hope you all like the theme. I expect it will be uploaded to spartacus over the next couple of days, I just want to hold off until after the weekend in case any major problems come up when other users start testing it.

Carl

Post by **Don Chambers** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 5:19 am

Carl - your work, from my experience, is about the best there is..... Sounds like you spent some long hours on this one. I didn't see it on your theme test site. Perhaps I missed it. What is the name there, so I can see it in action?

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 5:37 am

Hi Don,

Thanks for your comments, it feels good to know my work is appreciated. I haven't put that particular theme on the themes site yet (although it is the theme I use on my regular blog). The themes site has taken an absolute hammering today, over 12,000 hits, mostly because a dutch forum has posted a link, so I'm watching to see which pages get the most interest rather than thinking about adding Andreas08. It will happen, just might take a couple of days.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 11:10 am

Just let me know when I shall upload it to Spartacus.

)

The theme looks great as usual

Regards,
Garvin

costa · Post by **costa** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 3:07 pm

awesome work! i'm dying to see your css file and index.tpl... no tables used? oh man, why i must sit at work now? i must download it and play with it a little...

man, your themes and convertions rule!

Post by **Don Chambers** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 8:34 pm

From various posts, I am concluding there must be some benefit to "not using tables". What are the benefits, and what exactly replaces the tables?

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 3:32 am

tables are designed to show data that needs to be in tables, like calendars or info that would normally be in spreadsheets. Originally when HTML was first written the object was to be able to share information and have some universal markup so that everyone could see headers vs paragraphs, differences in versions of documents with ins/del etc and adequately recognise the references where other information could be found links etc.

It was so well received by almost everyone that it didn't take long for designers to cotton on to the fact that they could manipulate the html to produce pages that looked visually more impressive. Down side was complete anarchy with all and sundry moving away from standards and producing their own markup. XHTML, and css are designed to correct that, and place the html back where it belongs, as page structure, and leaving all the nice fancy stuff to the css. Problem is that we haven't quite got there yet and some browsers don't fully support the new standards so we still need hacks and many still use tables because at least they work easily.

Carl

Post by **Don Chambers** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 5:12 am

Are you saying that tables have been misused? If so, what is the correct replacement? <div>'s? If this is not the proper place to discuss, I apologize. It's Friday night in Chicago, USA... I really should be doing something other than sitting in front of my computer! LOL!!

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 5:27 am

yup, tables work, but they are very much a legacy of the past, and div's are the logical replacement. If you want a theme that uses div's instead of tables to compare, check out Garvin's mozilla tribute theme. Jude's ladybug theme took this to another level, and the work that Rob has done on his flex theme adds another dimension. These are all innovative designs that should probably be used as the basis for any new non-tables designs, especially if the user has an eye towards meeting accessibility requirements.

One other point, I think that any discussion we have in the forums that allows other users to follow our thinking etc is useful, even if we do end up hijacking a thread. Better to share our expertise/research than to remain silent.

Post by **Don Chambers** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 5:48 am

I'm a education junkie, so I will definitely check out the structure of those themes!

Can you elaborate on the "accessibility requirements"? I think I am starting to understand this.. for instance, I recently went through my site and tried to make sure that images had an "alt=" statement, but beyond that, I really do not know much.

You guys are gonna beat me to death until I really know this stuff, aren't you?!!!!

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Sat Mar 04, 2006 7:11 pm

Accessibility can be a minefield to navigate, but if you think of it this way. In an ideal world your site should work satisfactorily in every single browser, whether its a text reader, embedded in a fridge or car, or in a pda or mobile phone. The important thing to consider is that your site visitors have many needs, some have vision problems, others are disabled and need to use specialised pointing devices, others may have intellectual impairments and may need bright high contrast sites with big buttons and small chunks of content. Content is why your visitors come to your site, they don't come for the graphics, and the accessibility rules being implemented at government level are designed to enforce standards so that most people with disabilities or without access to high speed connections are still able to participate in the growth of the Internet. Local laws vary, and with personal blogs it isn't as important, but certainly in the UK and Australia it is now considered very desirable for even personal blogs to be accessible. I would expect that the next 2-5 years will see some major shake-ups in this area globally, and Serendipity theme designers probably need to seriously start learning so that as laws change we can update existing themes and be sure that new themes comply as much as possible.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 8:20 pm

Andreas08 has now been added to Spartacus via cvs. This is the first time I've used cvs and whilst I don't expect any problems, please le tme know if anything hasn't worked.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 8:24 pm

Hi Carl!

I just received a Mail from the CVS robot that told me you updated the "reflections" theme. Was this intentional? Or did you update anything therE?

BTW, it would be nice if you could save the template files with UNIX linebreaks (\n) and not with Windows linebreaks (\r\n). Our general coding style is to use UNIX linebreak, so this integrates more smoothly with the rest of Serendipity.

I'll wait for the CVS robot if it tells me more about your new commit - sometimes the robot lags a bit. You did first use "cvs add" to add a new directory to CVS? Only after you did that you can commit new files...

HTH,
Garvin

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 1:29 am

Garvin, I updated reflection (it now fully works with static pages, and also added the new feed icon), and also added Andreas08.

CVS is still very new to me, and I'm afraid I do all my html files in notepad. I've tried a few other text editors but none seem to give me the basic tools like notepad does. If you or anybody else could recommend a text editor for Windows that automatically saves with UNIX line-breaks I would be appreciative.

Also, I have now updated the reflection zipfile on my blog if you want to overwrite my attempt.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Mar 08, 2006 10:39 am

Carl: Personally I've been using UltraEdit for ages, which is IMHO the most powerful windows editor. They have a 30day trial version which you might want to check out!

I'll look into the CVS later today and see if it worked out!

Regards,
Garvin