Joop on Sugar

Some people say: "Less is more". I like the saying "less is less".

Today this blog went from 14 to 5 categories. In the last year or so the list of categories grew, mostly out of lazyness on my part. So I went through all the posts and tried to look at what I was trying to convey with it. As you can see now, most posts are about something I found on the web. That why there is the Linkdump categorie. I decided that, if the posts consists on nothing more then a link with an little explanation, that's a LinkDump.
Only if I expressed some opinion of my own, the post could have another category.
Next I deleted all categories that had names of specific programming techniques, like PHP or Ruby. All those posts are now in the Programming category. And so on, and so on.

It is still not perfect. I could go over the old posts again to finetune it. But I am happy now with the cleaned up menu on the left. It looks so much better now, doesn't it? ;-)

CSS is great, but anyone who has made pure CSS webdesigns knows browser inconsistencies, and the frustrations to make things work cross-browser. CSS hacks are used alot to deal with this problem, as a last resort. But nobody likes them. CSS hacks are ugly, sometimes even invalid code, and there is a fundamental thing wrong with it. You never know what happens with your design when a newer version of the webbrowser is released.

Last week 37signals, the creators of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp and other inspiring stuff, had an other idea to deal with the problem of browser inconsistencies in rendering CSS: javascript!
Rafael Lima took the idea and created the Javascript code. After you've added the javascript to your webpage, you can do stuff like this in CSS:

.ie .example {
background-color: yellow
}
.gecko .example {
background-color: gray
}
.opera .example {
background-color: green
}
.konqueror .example {
background-color: blue
}
.webkit .example {
background-color: black
}
.example {
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
background-color: brown;
}


I haven't had time yet to thoroughly test this script, but in the browers I checked (Mac OS X: Firefox, Safari, Opera) it works as advertised.

So with this new approach we can deal with browser inconsistencies without hacks, and still have valid code! And the beauty of it is: if a browser is not addressed by the javascript, it will render the default CSS style!

If you want to try this yourself, pick up the javascript from:

http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/