5x12 pentomino tiling
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New Year, New Template

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As the year draws to a close Beth's been working on her web pages here and that got me looking at mine. The old pages made heavy use of tables which we're not meant to be doing any more so here's my re-work of it, this time using CSS to do all the layout1. It's taken me most of the day today and there's still some work to do to tidy it up but it's pretty much done and it validates as HTML4.01 Strict with only a couple of errors2.

Among the changes this time is the switch to a serif font (probably some variation of Palatino on most platforms) but I've slightly widened the inter-letter spacing to make it more readable for old codgers like me.

The other addition to coincide with this re-working is a link to Wordnik's word of the day. I was inspired to add this after watching the co-founder and CEO of Wordnik Erin McKean speak at TED on redefining the dictionary.

  1. Along with a teeny bit of JavaScript: try making your browser window less than about 900 pixels wide and then re-load this page. Then make it wider and re-load again and you'll see what I've done. Essentially it's variable width until you hit 900 pixels, then it stops getting wider.
  2. Which are unavoidable because of the JavaScript above.

Tags: web design, words Written 28/12/09


Previous comments about this article:

On 02/03/10 at 2:22am Jez wrote:

Funnily enough I'm trying to do much the same thing. One of the things the good old w3c validator chokes on seems to be using & rather than & in urls:

Line 145, Column 76: reference to entity "papercode" for which no system identifier could be generated

Are there any plans to make Opus do the right thing here?

On 02/03/10 at 8:40am Paul wrote:

It's much less of a problem than it used to be as URL remapping reduces the use of & in URLs considerably, but it still needs fixing in some areas. What specifically was generating the error? It may be something I've already fixed in which case I'll do you a tarball.

On 02/03/10 at 11:43pm Jez wrote:

News Link php/bin/readarticle.php?articlecode=news&papercode=1 Also diary link seem to be the major culprits.

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