Welcome Spring! You know it's arrived when the rrrrim cups appear at Tim Horton's. 2 cups for me today and no winners. I remember the first year the rim promo came out I had a stack of winning cups, but the prizes seem to have gotten fewer and fewer each year. Just for fun, I think this year I'll keep track of cups:winners. So far it's 2:0
... almost there.
I participated in the Fundy Open over the weekend (that's me on the left) and came out ok. Middle of the pack in the Open Mixed event and gold in the women's foil. So now, I'm looking forward to the next tournament. Maybe the UNB Shield next weekend...
... or rather, thinking beyond the tables.
Over and over again I see the same questions crop up on a stylesheets listserv of which I'm a member. Most of the time it revolves around taking a tables-based layout and redoing it as a stylesheets layout. Most of the time it's a fairly straight-forward exercise. Sometimes the layout is quite complex - like the photoshop comps that we used to slice into table layouts - and that is when you need to think beyond the limitations of tables.
When you first transition from tables-based website layouts to stylesheets, there seems to be a huge shift in conceptualizing how to build the new designs. Most dramatic is the added dimension of depth. I'm not referring only to the z-index attribute but more to the concept of onion-skinning layers of presentation. Maybe you could think of it as the "Planes of Presentation" where building a website with CSS is more a concept exercise of layering various transparent planes containing bits of the overall presentation. The final product is then the overall view down through all the layers.
Getting to the point where you can free your mind from the limits of tables and being able to think in more spatial terms seems to be the major hurdle to overcome. But, once you're there the design possibilities are truly endless. Really they are - just visit the ZenGarden official designs site and see some outstanding examples of the same content presented with vastly different styles.
It's been a ridiculously long time since I've made any entries here, so now is the time to catch up. Work's been extremely busy - it's like we're cranking out websites on an assembly line. And after work between the usual at home madness (I have a husband, a teenager and a dog) there's been fencing/training - yikes! - the competition is next weekend, which means I have blades to mend before then *sigh*. It should come as no surprise that work on my blog has slid down the priority scale but when I've found time I've been working on tweaking the design a bit. I think it's time for a bit of a change. I'm not exactly ready to let go of this current design but I do feel it's time to update it a bit.
It's February already but I've managed to start training again (as I set out to do in a previous post "time to reconnect...recommit"). So I went back to the club on Tuesday and Wednesday night and glad to be back. I'll be entering the Fundy Open at the end of the month - we'll see how it goes.
