[thelist] Site check - reprocessed.org

[Matt Patterson]

Listees,

I've finally gotten my personal website, http://reprocessed.org/, into a
state where I'm comfortable inviting opinions.

Reprocessed.org is a pure XHTML/CSS/DOM construction, with an emphasis
on the separation of presentation and content. I've tried to do this
using clean markup and more complex CSS. I've placed a premium on not
coding for different browsers, and instead coding to the specs. I'd love
comments on the design, the CSS, the DOM scripting I've used as well as
issues like usability.

You may also find some of my writing of interest. There are a few 
essays about electronic publishing on the site, including my
undergraduate dissertation.

There are a few caveats, primarily that this is a CSS 2 site, and a lot
of the typography is achieved using contextual selectors that simply
won't work on IE on the PC. In the process of developing the site I've
fallen foul of some browser bugs and unvcovered others. I've also hit
problems with things behaving as they should but causing problems
anyway. The main things to watch out for are these:

General problem: I use a position: fixed navigation bar, and links
within a page cause the heading or other part of the page to jump right
to the top of the page, as they should. This leaves them obscured by the
bar, which can be annoying, especially when coupled with the Mozilla bug
below...

Browser bugs:

IE 5/Mac [OS 9]: There's a bug in the implementation of position: fixed
which basically renders all links unclickable if the page is scrolled
away from the top of the page. To work around this the position: fixed
navigation bars are switched to position: absolute ones. This isn't the
best solution and I'm considering others, although the problem has been
largely fixed in the Mac OS X version of IE.

IE 6/PC: There's a bug with @import whereby chained importing (page
imports local stylesheet imports section stylesheet imports base
stylesheet) can only follow three deep, which presented a problem with a
few documents which imported a special stylesheet, then the local,
section and base ones. The base stylesheet never got imported, causing
basic presentation features to be undefined. A mess. I've used a
workaround, but I have to say that I don't like it.

Mozilla/Netscape 6: There's a bug with screen redrawing and position:
fixed objects that only manifests itself here (as far as I can tell)
when the secondary navigation stuff is switched on in the Essays section
of the site. The bug causes bits of the navigation bar to draw
themselves down the screen when you scroll up. Fix by reloading or
simply resizing the window slightly. Hopefully this will be fixed quite
soon.

Other browsers have problems which aren't bugs as such:

Opera: Due to limitations in the DOM implementation in Opera the more
advanced navigation and note features I've used in Essays section of the
site simply don't work. I tried working around with no joy, so sorry
folks...

OmniWeb: OmniWeb's Javascript, DOM and CSS implementations in 4.0 are
seriously lacking, however it does understand @import. the front page is
protected from this, but internal pages aren't. While it doesn't render
them unusable - all the content's there but it's an awful mess visually.

Thanks!

Matt


-- 
   Matt Patterson | Typographer
   <matt at reprocessed.org> | http://reprocessed.org/