ie is sort of opensource? point me in the direction where i can download the source code...

If you go for the bigger open source programs, major bugs should be minimal, as there should be plenty of people to beta test code before final release, which in theory should find most major bugs.

whats to stop you buying software and then finding the company goes bust, and there is no chance of support for their software? at least with open source software someone else could pick up the code a fix the problems. besides the most popular software is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

if you'll tend to look closer at programs when companies like Google buy them up, why not use openoffice, its well established and backed by a major company, seems a good reason to try it...

This post got me thinking, and was wondering who here uses open source software? and why?

Personally I try to use it for whatever I can.

At home i use firefox, thunderbird, openoffice, notepad++, filezilla, nvu to name a few.
My website is based on wordpress, again an opensource project. I can understand why people use programs such as autocad, ms office in business, but for personal use I am yet to find anything missing from the above open source programs that I actually need.

Not only does it save me money, but most of them provide the same if not better functionality than their paid for counterparts.

do you use o.s. software?
if not why not??

@unknownuser said:

Richard I think we are just moving from context to context which makes it hard to follow

Sorry, my trail of thought often wanders around a bit like that, but the only reason i mentioned a forum was to use as an explanation for my comment about .css and dynamic content (as this is a forum it just seemed the most obvious thing to choose).

I would like to point out that i understand where you are coming from, and the reasons why you are using the yahoo sitebuilder, and for beginners it probably is the best way of doing things.

From what started as a mere observation (and thats all it was intended to be) about html/css/validity/semantics has diverted the topic a little off course (which i didn't mean to do). with this in mind, I will make this my last comment on this subject, unless there is a specific request which i could help with.

@unknownuser said:

...if you are suggesting .css is for improving dynamic page content....

thats not what i was suggesting, take this forum for example, the content is dynamic, and generated by a lot of php code, if the presentation was tied into the code and not separate from the content, it would probably be very difficult to change the presentation - it relies upon having a separate .css file (and .tpl files). Hope that makes sense.

@unknownuser said:

(I promise, my last comment on this...content effects presentation and presentation effects content....they need to change together.

when i talk about content i mean (in general at least) the actual words and images which provide the information and focus of a page, and not the fancy graphics, rollover effects and layout of the page (which in my opinion is the style of the page). Adding a paragraph of text or adding an image does not and should not effect the style, neither should changing the style of a page effect the content. I will accept that the content and style should be considered in unison and that having them separate is an advantage in terms of management. I agree changes to the style and content will directly effect the overall presentation of a page. I guess what i'm saying is that style and content are independent from each other but both effect the presentation of a page. So i guess i'm not disagreeing with you, we just have different ways at looking at the same thing. hope you understand what i'm getting at, but if not it doesn't matter. In the end I think we'll agree to disagree.

@unknownuser said:

I appreciate the inspiration

glad to be of help!

Edit : sorry to hijack the topic!

I've never used templates either until now, and thats only to use as a the underlying structure of the site, rather than for its presentation.

frames are outdated but iframes aren't. however i would stil not use them (personal preferance more than anything) and simply separate header, menus, content and footer into separate files and join them up with php or something similar (but obviously not everyong has access to a server with php, or wants to use it even if they do)

@unknownuser said:

Richard...Although this is great stuff you are showing it is not for us beginners yet

I agree with that, I just felt it was worthwhile showing it. At the moment (from what i have read) you are explaining very well the basics of web design, and the people following your advice should start to understand the structure of a web page (as well as an understanding of some of the html behind what they see) and may in the future see the benefit in .css. and you'd probably be surprised at how easy some of it is to convert

@unknownuser said:

We need to be able to control elements of the page independently. The template approach that Sitebuilder lets us build is surprisingly powerful and affords complete control. As well .css is somewhat limiting when it comes to independant page marking...not sure why anyone would build a site that is less than 100 pages with .css. By the way I am not personally impressed with .css as you know.. slaping down the same static theme for every page on a site is well..noticable...every single well designed page just looks like the last one.

It may be the way i'm interpreting what you said above (and forgive me if i'm mistaken), but it sounds like you don't like sites which have a consistant design throughout. I agree though that some sites it is too noticable and would suggest that it is because the quality of the design outweighs the quality of the content.

@unknownuser said:

If I seem a bit turse please forgive me...this is good advise.

you don't seem turse at all, we have a difference of opinions and its a good debate, which would probbaly be best left for another thread (i don't want to confuse things too much!)

@unknownuser said:

(unless you are happy removing your entire engine each time you need to clean a spark plug)

I have to disagree with that comment. The biggest advantage of using .css (at least in my opinion) is that content and presentation are separate. Content can effortlessly be changed without effecting presentation, and presentation can be changed across the entire site without effecting the actual content.

@gaieus said:

Plus is you don't build a static site, you'll need them for sure

I agree with Gai on this, not using .css on a dynamic site would be far too difficult.

since you're looking at nav bars etc, i thought i'd drop in this bit of work which i did a while ago, which you may or may not find useful. i realise its not a high priority at the moment, but you may be find it interesting to see what can be done with css.

Standalone Menu

The main aim of this was to create the triangle that you see to the left of the menu items without the need for images.
the beauty of this is that to add another menu item all that has to be added within the menu structure is the following

<li><a href="link here" title="description"><span></span>MENU TITLE</a></li>

Menu within a page

if you also look at the source for the above page the content is actually coded to come before the menu items, so in search results (which pay no attention to styling) the content is more likely to be displayed in the page summary instead of the menu list.

modelhead, I wasn't sure whether the page i linked to was correct or not, and don't reallyy know much about iframes as i've never had the need to use them. and that was one of the first pages that i came to when searching how iframes are indexed - i was trying to find out how they compare to frames. so i'll hold my hands up to that one and admit i might be wrong.

@unknownuser said:

Richard...that could be the case but as I said we a rendering properly everywhere!!

I realize that, and if you declare a doctype in your pages now, this will probably change. so you are right to leave it as it is for now.

as for standards affecting page rank, i think it does, but to what extent i'm not sure. Following standards should ensure well structured html (and therefore content) which may effect page rank. Also worth noting is that according to this page "the content of an iframe isn't loaded by a web crawler/indexer. That is something that only happens in a browser. What a search engine sees is only the iframe code, it does not see the "content" of the frame. Make sure that all pages stand alone in regards to indexable content. Keep in mind that the content of the iframe will not be seen or indexed or counted towards keyword density of the page"
I really have hijacked this thread haven't I...
back to those tutorials now...

I think (and i stand to be corrected) that a lot of the problems occur because IE (ver 6 and earlier at least) has a buggy implementation of most CSS, and therefore needs a doctype to force it to follow the standards. So if you write html to a particular standard, you should definately declare the doctype, otherwise, theres no point, and including it will probably result in incorrectly rendered pages.

krisidious: there should be no reason why you can't use images for navigation...

@krisidious said:

yes firefox is different this script is for IE only...

which raises another question do you check if your sites display and operate correctly across different browsers? do safari users see what an ie user does? does a page operate the same in firefox as it does in opera? I have to admit that I don't do this (although I probably will do)

orry to drag this topic off course..

modelhead, not sure if i'm understanding you correctly, but declaring the doctype is important. essentially the doctype tells your browser what standard your page is written to and how it should interpret the code, otherwise it will display the pages in quirks mode, but probably (for now) isn't something to worry about too much.

krisidiuos, that code doesn't prevent right click in firefox... and if i really want the image i can view the source and find the location of the image anyway. I would suggest you don't use 1139 x 1709 pixel images if yo are worried about copyright, especially when the originating page only displays them at 340 x 499.

model head, the w3c (as far as i am aware actually help to set the standards) and i think the validator is the most up to date there is (was last updated on the 8th of this month).

It is interesting though, that both firefox and internet explorer do not pass the acid2 test. The Acid2 test should render correctly on any browser that follows the W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications. So you may produce a fully compliant webpage, which is then not rendered correctly by your browser anyway. which sort of defeats the purpose of following standards in the first place.

however, in my opinion, if we all write valid code, we'll encourage developers of internet browsers to produce programs which can render standards compliant code correctly, and in the end creating better cross browser compatibility of our websites.

The way I see is a bit like writing a book, you wouldn't expect to publish a book which was full of grammatical errors, neither would I design a building which didn't conform to building regulations etc. so why should I write a page that doesn't follow standards?

however, just to take one of your pages from your page you link to in your sig (http://www.ibuildmodels.com/edson/index.html), which is not valid (check here) most of the errors are the same type, and probably a good indication that the yahoo sitebuilder produces reasonably valid code.

also, as a quick test i tried FireVox screen reader which produces some interesting results!

Put your sites through http://validator.w3.org/ and http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ and you'll see the non valid html that the pages have. This isn't to say that your pages are unreadable or inaccessible, in fact most of the time people probably won't even notice (i'm just fussy!)

I've just started building my wordpress based site, and having the presentation in a separate file means that if i need to tweak the design slightly etc only one file has to be altered to change the style of the whole site (no matter how many pages there are).

have a look at http://www.csszengarden.com/ for good examples of design and using css to control presentation.

don't get me wrong i'm not criticising anyones work here, and from what i've seen there is some good work being produced, besides i'm no expert in html/css either!

I have sort of followed this topic for a while now as i'm currently building a website for myself and was looking out for anything useful which might help me. I've not used the yahoo site builder thing before, so i've no idea what its like. From wha i can tell its a wysiwyg editor. But i couldn't help noticing that some of the pages you've made aren't valid html/css.

Personally if its a business' site I think its important for it to be valid, as well as being semantically correct, ie if you have a paragraph, use a paragraph element. If you have a list, use a list item element and using tables for tabulating data, and not structuring the page. And ideally presentation should be separate from structure, ie css separated into a css file.

done correctly everyone can access and read your page, whether its from a desktop pc, handheld device, screen reader (for vision impaired users) or a text browser such as lynx.

Not sure how important you think it is, or whether you've considered this already , but thought i'd mention it.

I used Foobar for quite a while, but now I tend to just use windows media player.

Excellent!
looking forward to seeing it put into context

@unknownuser said:

This whole thing has been a tease. I wanna see the finished bike already! Haha, no rush though.

I would love too see the finished bike too!! When I first thought about doing this I hadn't really intended to go into quite so much detail as I have, but I don't really have enough spare time to do as much as I'd like to with this.

I'm glad I have gone into as much detail as I have, and I am determined to get this finished eventually!! but I will be glad when it's complete.

@jon said:

Wow! This model so far is incredible! What would be awesome is instead of textures of stitching on the saddle, actual 3d stitches.

That did cross my mind (and will probably try it at a later date!..)

In the meantime I've had a few minutes spare to model a brake disc rotor

Started on the saddle now...

[click to enlarge]

I have since realised that what I thought were white lines are actually stitching, if I have time I might change the texture to show stitching instead, but for now I'm happy with it as it is.