Cathode Tan - Games, Media and Geek Stuff
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Sunday, May 13, 2007

Notes From Management

I finally got the logo Corvus had so graciously designed plugged into Blogger. It's not exactly the treatment we had thought, but that is actually more due to wrangling with Blogger's built-in template more than anything else.

On a side note to that - this is the third time in the last week or so I've run into problems doing a relatively straightforward update to a design due to what I like to call "OPCSS". Or, Other People's CSS. See the thing is - CSS can be an amazingly powerful tool for maintaining content. The problem is that someone can so overdefine basic things like margins, paddings, alignment across so many elements at once that unless the guy after you follows those assumptions - things go caterwampus.

At work we've got some consultants running amok and our designer keeps telling me they're going to push to go "no tables". I've been hearing (and at one point even agreed) this line of thinking for several years now. The problem with the theory is that while common CSS approaches offer many advantages over the old pure HTML of old ... in may ways CSS still sucks. It's not well standardized, it's flaky in places and just downright clunky in others.

The theory that "tables are bad" stems from the belief that they take up more HTML and are slow to render. The first is only true, though, if you don't require a fresh page of CSS to accomplish the precision you need and the second is only true if the layout has gone over two or three recursions of tables with a lot of old-school image spacers and the like.

Anyway - brief rant over. I'll probably try and keep tweaking the look through next week. C also provided an amber colored logo which might replace the green, should I get over my Apple II nostalgia at some point.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I actually rather like it this way. Want a version with the text dropped down since it doesn't need to be out of the way of the tagline?

Josh said...

I might, let's let this one burn in a bit first.