BrainFuel

There’s nothing worse then having an awesome web-design layout with some sweet CSS code, and other cool stuff, when you preview it in Internet Explorer and disaster strikes. Internet Explorer never displays stuff the way you want it to! So I have an idea. There’s a spot called PetitionOnline where you can, well, post petitions online. I wrote one last night. Tell me what you think. Would you sign it, and further the Web Design cause?

We the undersigned hereby announce our wishes to Microsoft Corporation that it update both Mac and Windows verison of Internet Explorer. In its present form, Internet Explorer is nearly incapable of displaying CSS (also known as Cascading Style Sheets) and other new web technologies correctly, which results in frustration from web designers.

Our requirements for this update to Internet Explorer are as follows:

1. That Internet Explorer is made to display CSS and other web content to the caliber of FireFox, or Safari (other web browsers which display things correctly).

2. That Internet Explorer is made more secure, as to help prevent viruses from infecting people’s computers.

This is, in reality, simply a humble request for Microsoft to make it’s emminant web browser actually work. By leaving Internet Explorer on the shelf to gather dust, Microsoft is depriving many of the people on the Internet a good overall experience of the World Wide Web.

Web designers shouldn’t have to dumb down their design or creativity on account that most of the people on the internet use a web browser that does not display content correctly. This is frustrating, annoying, and unnaceptable.

This is downright cool. I want to go to the hotel!

Hey, doesn’t everyone wanna learn XHTML? I looked into this tutorial a bit, and found it worth while. *Cough* I didn’t actually *cough cough* go through the whole tutorial, but I learned a bit, and I must say, XHTML isn’t all that exciting. However, it is pretty impressive to be able to put “Valid XHTML” at the bottom of your website, eh?

Yesterday, on a whim, I checked out Hershey’s website (you know, the people who make chocolate). Pretty good design.

Yes, I know I’m hyper-critical about everything, but I must say: I didn’t find anything super-technical on their site—No CSS—in fact, most of what composed the site was mainly images. On the plus side, however, I give their designer credit. He made a website that was dominantly brown look pretty good, and the wide color palette somehow brings everything together. This site makes me hungry.

Yeah, it’s true—you can actually make functional drop-down menus with CSS. The link contains a very interesting article.
By the way, A List Apart seems to be a pretty good source to learn little hints and secrets about CSS.

The site design is pretty decent, too. Nice coding, good layout.

We were going to do a CSS drop-down menu for the new Brainfuel site, but we could never resolve the Win Internet Explorer problem. We got it to work with the php include categories thing, though, so that was cool.

I figured out a cute little trick for designing templates while working on Brainfuel: Experiment on a blog elsewhere on the server, but using the same MySQL database. It worked for me, and was a good simulation of actually editing the real BrainFuel, without actually doing so.

Check out W3School’s CSS quiz. Good for small amounts of entertainment.
I got 17 out of 20.

After that, check out the CSS Validator. Free, and very useful.