Rewrite

At the moment, I’m attempting to completely rewrite the HTML and CSS beneath clagnut (you won’t see any changes until it’s all done). In terms of HTML, I think the site is written pretty well; there’s very little Bed and BReakfast markup and it’s pretty accessible. There is, however, room for improvement; there a too many nested divs, particularly when more relevent markup (usually a list) could and should have been used.

As for the CSS, the site has grown organically over the past 8 months and the style sheet has grown with it. Combined with the extra divs, there are heaps of classes which I’m struggling to keep track of, generally making things a bit of a ’mare. Plus, as mentioned before, the margins are erroneous on IE6.

The new mantra is context before class. Which translated means don’t use a class for presentation when the context of the HTML element is equally unique, e.g. a <p> element inside <div class="sidebar"> does not need a separate class of sidebartext. Hixie goes as far as to advocate not using classes at all.

I plan to publish a complete build/design spec once I’m done. I’ll keep you posted. Saila’s Web building tips might help me along the way.