moeffju.net

Are you tired of people making their URLs look so important? Do you hate to hear them brag how cool and memorizable their URLs are? Then this site is for you: Make An Ugly Link - making short URLs look more important since, um, 2004.

You may or may not remember the ‘good’ old days of 1998, when HTML Tables were new and the technique of using transparent 1-pixel GIF images was a proper means to create HTML layouts. Luckily, those days are long gone now, even though sites like the Internet Archive remind many of us about the sins of our youth.

After that ugly era of tables and capitalized HTML tags, the wonderful age of CSS came into view, heralding great promise. You might remember when they said CSS would rid us of table-based layouts once and for all. Guess what, they lied. While you can technically design pages using only CSS, there’s still a lot lacking. You have to jump through hoops to properly get float: left|right items to show. It’s near impossible to do something as simple as having a body area that takes up at least the full window height, which before was a matter of saying <table height="100%" width="100%"> and some well-placed <tr>s.

Granted, browser bugs and inconsistencies are responsible for a lot of the hassles you’re going through with CSS at the moment, but if you’re creating HTML for a business website, you don’t have much of a choice other than supporting Internet Explorer version 5.5 upwards at least. With private websites, you don’t have to bother making it all shine, it’s sufficient if it doesn’t break (for example, the navigation on the right is position: fixed and thus breaks on IE, but it’s still usable — just that it doesn’t scroll with the viewport). If you have the time, you can hack it to work in other (read: non-compliant) browsers. I don’t have that time.

The reason for this rant is some fun I had helping a friend on a web page. The seemingly innocent and simple task of centering the whole content area of a website already requires CSS hacks for IE. At least this time, validity was not impaired.

Someone should make Gecko mandatory.

I’ve brought Mattness, my photography site, into a working-good-enough state. It finally features a portfolio and a contact form, and thus has the functionality it needs to ‘go public’. Next on the list is distributing the model wanted flyers.

In case you’re from Germany or the BeNeLux area and interested in modeling, check Mattness. And in any case, have a look at my deviantART gallery.