Green Bar Redesign: New Features
You Call That New?
Browser Away
This is what the site is supposed to look like:
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This is what it looks like if the browser doesn't understand CSS (or Netscape 4*) [If you're using Opera, try 
-AJ]:
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*Netscape 4, by the way, has a bug that has never been fixed. Chances are you've never encountered it if you're using NN4. You see, it's a bug that causes the browser to crash in a rather spectacular way if it encounters a particular piece of valid HTML/CSS coding. The reason you probably haven't encountered it is because there aren't a lot of sites that actually contain valid code. Many sites were designed by people who simply got tired of waiting for a browser that implemented all of the HTML/CSS standards, and they started writing code that worked in the available browsers.
That's been going on for seven years now. Hypertext Markup (HTML) version 4 has been a standard since about 1995, and all of the browsers since then have supported it. Cascading Style Sheets have been a standard since 1996. The first top-line browser to fully support CSS-1 was released in 2001. It wasn't until 2002 that the three top-line browsers fully implemented the standard, and the standard is old. The latest CSS standard is CSS-2 which was standardized in 1998 and none of the top three browsers fully implement it.
It's Arbor Day All Over Again!
The final new feature of this new design, like I said, is more printer friendly. Now, I hear you saying: "How can it be more printer friendly, you've got that green bar down the right side? That's going to come out all black and grey and each page is going to use enough toner to cover a city block!" Never fear, I wouldn't lie to you.
Of course, the browser you're using will play a part in all of this but, through the magic of Cascading Style Sheets I can promise you that it won't use that much toner. You see, I've designed a special style sheet just for your printer. It turns off the green link bar down the side, and some of the graphics, so all you'll be printing is the stuff in the white part of the page. Okay, it's supposed to work according to the standards, and I know it works in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 6, and Opera 6.
With the old design, if you wanted to print a document without all the graphics and the link bar, you'd have to select the text and print just the selection, or select the text, copy it to the clipboard, open a word processor, paste the text, and print the new document. That's not very friendly. So, this is what the previous page should look like on your printer:
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Final Thoughts
Some of you may be wondering what this graphic means:
All that means is that I ran the site through an HTML validator to make sure everything on every page was within the standards. The standards, by the way, are set by a group called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short). They are the ones charged with making sure the different scripting languages are standardized so that on every site the same markup is used to mean the same thing, and that every browser understands that markup and treats it the same as every other browser. They are the people who make sure we can all access the WWW without the need for 27 different applications, or 98 extensions to one application.
Through their long work and vigilance, I can write a web site that anyone can access. One that isn't designed only for Red Hat Linux users in Belgium who've hacked and ported IE5/Mac to Linux. All I had to do was get over my natural tendency to tweak a design to get it to work in a particular group of browsers. And now, for your viewing pleasure, a top-to-bottom comparison of the old design, and the new one:
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