[thelist] critique and review request for 2 sites

[Samir M. Nassar]

Followup:

Hugh,

Thanks for pointing out the inconsistency between the logo and the link
and domain name. In my mind it is always just OSDS. Fixed.

Liam,

Thanks for pointing that out. It is funny, because using Opera 6 - beta
1 (Linux) it was seamless. I was almost resigned to leaving it, and
attributing the different browser interpretations to "flavor", but as I
tried to go back to bed I thought 'z-index'. Fixed.

Andrew,

I couldn't figure out what you were talking about... until I started
drifting off. XHTML, even in the Transitional dialect is very strict
about the general structure. It is, after all, atranslation of HTML to
conform to XML. Even in HTML opening a tag without closing it will not
validate, although you wouldn't know it from the User Agents. In XML and
XHTML this applies to standalone tags as well. Like IMG and META.

I am probably not the best person to answer this, but here is my try.

It makes sense from a parsing standpoint when you think of
well-formedness. UA's or servers parse our markup and they look for
closing tags to know when to start or end things. Like P or DIV. So when
IMG and META are standalones it just makes sense to apply the rule to
them as well, but since they don't contain anything but themselves you
just end them with a slash.

Samir M. Nassar
RedConcepts.NET - Open Source, Public Service
http://www.redconcepts.net

<tip type="Consistent alignment using XHTML and CSS2" author="Samir M.
Nassar">

If you want to help ensure rendering consistency across UA's where boxes
are concerned remember the 'z-index' property in CSS2.

You can elongate the offending box on the offending side and assign it a
smaller z-index than the 'main' area (just make sure you give the main
area a higher z-index as well). This will bury a portion of the
offending box beneath main area and will allow your markup to be fluid
enough to accomodate pretty much any browsers that renders z-index
correctly.
</tip>