how about a counter how many change the design back to bleached? would be interesting…

Anyway, my first taste of this site was the bleached version… Today I checked up… and didn’t know where I was!

This design is very nice as well, but I definately prefer the bleached design. No surprise really since many of my designs look similar… but I found Liquid Bleach much easier to read.

Is there anyway to continue to view the site with that style sheet?

About a year back I played with a similar idea to that of bleached, where a site was sectioned off and colour coded. I used different CSS includes to set the colour info and a base CSS file to do layouts. I think the idea of separating the two is quite an important thing to address in a upmarket web design company as you need to produce quality work for clients with small lead times. Being able to “Refactor” design elements (You can tell I’m more from a software programming/engineer background) is important in “Object Orientated Programming”. It’s nice to see the same thing applied to CSS.

I’ve recently played about with the idea a little more along with the liquid / sliding faux column concept. One of the issue is the way IE doesn’t have a min-width etc. However I’ve read through all of the comments in this post, and the thing you posted on using expression() works very well and is not that hard to use. However you do need to use a comment based CSS filter or conditional comment filters in the head section of the markup.

If you look at http://jason.hybd.net/Jason.html it shows this concept very well along with faux columns for the liquid based design that works in IE. I personally think elastic designs work better myself due to the fact that they are more predictable with the placement of items. However IE seems to mess up a lot with elastic designs and therefore I used a liquid layout. However in other browsers, it goes into a elastic mode. Also, the issue with liquid designs is they are harder to read at big screen resolutions (though most people with Hi res screens buy them so that they can have lots of windows open and thus don’t maximise browser widows).

As far as liquid designs go, using the faux sliding column concept, I think that a max-width limit must be placed on designs, as there are the odd few people with very large desktops. My screen res at home is 3200 by 1200 and the example you and Eric made up does break after 3000 px obviously. One advantage over liquid designs over elastic is the fact that elastic designs often use some variant of the Skidoo layout, which is very hacked from a CSS point of view and therefore the use of borders as column is something I dislike personally, though it does work very well. However these seem more readable and they don’t break when the text size is put up. My design seems to still retain it’s layout even at 4000ish pixels.

As far as the mark up issues of extra divs is concerned, I must agree with you here, an couple of extra wrapper divs go a long way towards avoiding float bugs in IE and box model issues. More importantly, in a liquid or elastic layout where you might have some drop shadow on your page wrapper’s, you need to make use of extra divs for margins there as one can not combine em units for the page content with px units for things like gutters and image white-space objects like drop shadows.

I have yet to test my design in IE 5.2 for the Mac, I think it could prove interesting. It works OK in Konqueror 3.2 so Safari should be OK. I’ll soon find out when I get back on the Mac tomorrow :-) (another words don’t have a go at me if things break on the Mac, I know many here are Mac purists).

As for the min-width support, etc in IE, I personally think it’s worth using the expression hack. I know it looks ugly, but it’s no worst than the Mac IE filters, etc. As for the voodoo effect, that’s not too hard to follow if you’ve come from a programming background and know how the inline C conditional operator works. This does go a long way as most people still use IE and therefore IE 5.5 and 6 support is a bigger priority to me than any other browser.

On a side note, it’s nice to see the colour back on this page :) Maybe you’ll present us with an elastic or liquid version of this colour design (that will be a challenge with all the images :-P )

Anyway, your article on faux sliding columns proved to be very handy. I can see us using it a lot at work :-) I’m surprised the idea hasn’t been pushed in the CSS community before as it’s a very basic concept.

<$MTEntries lastn="1"$>

This will present only the first entry. Then, somewhere below that, you use the following code:

<$MTEntries lastn="howeverMany" offset="1"$>

This will present howeverMany entries below that lastest entry. The offset attribute tells MT not to include the latest entry for the second time.

I’m not intimately familiar with WP’s templating syntax, so I’m not even sure if WP allows you to do this.

My only problem would be that I’m using WordPress, so I’d have to find somthing compatible. Where would I start in finding something that could do that, or coding that?

This is a bit of sidebar, but… at some point could elaborate a bit on your use of different MT blogs throughout your site? (similar to your explanation given around the design of your portfolio section)

I would really like to see some colour injected into this layout before you return to the old layout, from my experience, implementing colour on a full screen layout such as this can be the hardest part of the design, but that’s just me.

One thing that does have me thinking overtime though, if you are setting a min-width and a max-width, can this truly be regarded as a liquid layout? Or do these parameters contradict the whole idea? In other words, does this just become a strange hybrid relatively positioned fixed width layout? (It is getting late here so I may just be having a brain fart.;)

Look forward to the next step!

Thats just my two cents

Stefan