Shout at the [div]el!

Been watching the Lynda.com tutorial for Dreamweaver and it gave me a boost to my already inflating coding ego. Why would you want to use all that crap on the side to work w/ your code? It seems great, and there are some surprising features built in there, but the strength of learning how to create a working page from the ground up is liberating. I started hand coding by using NotePad. Nothing else. When I actually started using DW it almost felt like cheating! The XHTML was highlighted in different colors, the sides were numbered, and the Doctype was already done. When I started typing in my rules and the selection menu popped up I almost crapped myself. This is too easy! So think of coding w/ NotePad like swinging a weighted bat in the on-deck circle before stepping up to the plate. Once you take the weights off the bat feels super light; same w/ using DW.

What I've been working on lately is repeatedly coding new pages from scratch so I can build up some habits. I'm also pushing hard to learn to create different

box styles. I've recreated some that I've seen but mostly I'm trying to do things that I haven't seen yet. I'm struggling deciding on resolution compatibilities vs. design intent. I like the idea of liquid sites, but I haven't seen a reason for it yet. Everything I've wanted to produce would be destroyed being resized by a smaller resolution. They'd have to have a pretty small screen though; the largest I've done has been 800px wide. That'll be accessible to a variety of screen types.

That's not nearly the struggle that aligning these bastards has been. The descriptions that the W3C gives for relative, absolute, and the rest almost border on philosophy. I have yet to wrap my brain around them. So I've been searching for those that have created something very similar, and seeing how they resolved the issues. I've found a range of hacks that force things to happen like centering, but there's still something missing. Perhaps I'm putting too much thought into it. I can say that I can hand code a page in tables in a freakishly fast time. I feel like I have a better amount of control w/ tables at the moment, but that's because they're easier to code compared to divs. They are ridiculously messy too. Looks like crap on the screen.

I can't believe how fast I've turned into a CSS code snob/aficionado. I would've laughed at myself a couple of months ago before I started drinking the "standards Kool-Aid", hearing myself talk about how code looks. It makes total sense though. The faster the load, the better the mood the user has while visiting your site. You can see how a JavaScript laden site continues loading while the content is present on the screen. My site for example has rollover effects w/in the body for my gallery; sometimes I've found myself freaking out thinking the links are broken because things don't immediately display correctly.

I can't freakin' wait to get the time to redesign my portfolio site; it's sort of embarrassing now. I like my art, but there's too much that I want to change for it to stay much longer.

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