Coredump

Found a great piece on enforcing model-view separation for web applications. Lots of technobabble (I had to reread the part referencing Chomsky's grammar classes), but it helps in moving towards having a comman base for creating templating engines. Nice read.

Nearing crunchtime to the big presentation, and I'm still plagued by major design changes to the prototype. Makes me want to barf, but I can't, because, really, I've painted myself in the corner on this one. I was so keen on sticking to standards-based design that I totally ignored how it would render on "less-worthy" clients. Bah! Let them upgrade! I say. Thing is, majority -- no, in fact, all of them -- of the audience for the site I'm developing don't know an upgrade (much more how to go about doing one) if it lands in their collective noses. So strike one for usability. Also, the information architecture is still way too convoluted. Okay, so I've made it easier to navigate, but it's still not as intuitive as I thought. Again, it was arrogance on my part: it was easy enough for me to wade through content because I know what to look for, but what about first-time visitors? And, the structure is more than three levels deep, and that, for me, is a...

S!M!T!O!E!, this one does. Just when I thought I was nearing the homestretch (linting the code, polishing it for PHP), IE and its ilk comes along to break my code in ways only its (IE's) designers know. Pictures -- browsercam shots in this case -- speak volumes. Well here, they fairly shout.

Just when I thought I was almost through with the site prototype, yet another CSS gotcha caught me. It's a trivial flaw, actually: see, embedded Flash does not cooperate with CSS positioning. No matter how deep the value I add to the z-index property, the Flash element always bleeds over other HTML elements that overlap with it on the page. (See screenshot below.) I haven't explored this problem deeply -- haven't got the time: crunch time is less than two days away -- but I think this is similar to another layer-bleed problem that occurs with select elements. Although I could place the Flash content in its own horizontal layer without any adjacent layers that will overlap it (like the popup menu I'm using for the site), that would result in real estate coverage for the Flash content larger than I would have preferred. Well, why use Flash at all? I mean, I could just replace it with a static image, and it would work sweetly, but that's not really what I want to a...

Had to refurbish the whole site prototype because of one trivial flaw: Flash doesn't cooperate with CSS position that well. (See screenshot below.) I'm nearing the homestretch -- in fact, crunchtime is less than two days away -- and yet, I have this nagging feeling that if I can't find a quick workaround to this, I'm better off trashing the design. I'm being a bit dogmatic about CSS, I know, but I can't have it any other way. I've made a commitment to stick to standards, and I'm going to make the site as usable and accessible as possible. The users should not be made to suffer because of poor design and ill-conceived adhockery. So back to the drawing board. Good thing I've got several other templates ready. The nice thing about standards-based design is that I can retool the site without so much as touching the semantically valid (I hope) content. Heck, I could even add CSS skins, if I could afford the time -- and if users can handle the sophisticati...