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A New Look for the Site

2006, September 22 - 3:45pm — vyvy

I have finally taken the action to design my own drupal theme for this site. I want to design one because I would like to have more control over it. What I want for my theme is simple but not too simple:

Look neat and simple. Special thanks to Jia for many contructive suggestions. :) I think she has more artistic and common sense than me.
Good XHTML and CSS Practices. One very important thing I concern about is the compliance with the XHTML and CSS standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium. I have also tried to follow some recommended practices such as avoiding tables for formatting page layout. The page currently complies with XHTML 1.0 and CSS2.1. I would like to upgrade it to XHTML 1.1, which requires only the omission of the lang attribute (in favor of xml:lang) for language selection. Unfortunately, it seems that many browsers including firefox are not ready for it yet.
Won't compromise with Internet Explorer! Although Internet Explorer is the most popular browser as of this writing, it is unfortunately not a good browser. It does not support the XHTML and CSS standards correctly, has poor support for PNG images with transparent layers, and suffers from many other problems. This page may not look nice under IE, but I can't care much. So far, I have only done two things for IE: (a) Make sure that the page content is still readable; (b) Issue a warning to the IE users about some issues surfing with IE.
Easy maintenance. Since I'm using Drupal, I made use of its default theme engine PHPTemplate to code the theme for easy upward compatibility. I also tried to make use of the default templates for various components.

Hope that now you have a better surfing experience here. I will still continue to fine-tune the page layout and the CSS a bit—it's a tedious job as there are too many things CSS needs to control. Constructive suggestions are welcomed!