I have this template: title on top, illustration, text below, navigation button on the bottom. Everything I’ve done has been a tweak of that basic idea, and it gets irritating; you see the picture, scroll down, read the text, scroll back up to see the picture again, scroll back down to click next. What if –
Nah.
No! What if I do the unthinkable, and make the text a graphic? I’m still playing with this – it’ll mean larger file sizes, but maybe I should start to think ahead to a day when the majority of visitors have modems faster than a cold slug on sand. Here’s the old version. Here’s the new idea. It's still too busy, but you can see what I'm aiming at. It means more work – an incredible amount of work, frankly – but it makes the site look more like the book version I’d love to do.
Now Lileks is used to the tables and spacer images layout model, but there is a way he can have his text and his layout without making everything a graphic - HTML + CSS.
I spent 15 minutes in BBEdit and CSSEdit to make a 21st century XHTML+CSS version.
Note that it is simpler HTML than his old version, but has the approximate layout style of the new version (I'm an engineer Jim, not a typographer). I even got drop shadows in Safari.
I have nothing against DreamWeaver - friends of mine work on it - and I'm sure it can do CSS too.
Done right, this should actually be less work than either of Lileks’ alternatives.
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