Lottery Post Journal

Today represents a major milestone in the reconstruction of the Lottery Post web site.  I have just finished taking one complete pass through the entire web site, changing every single page to the new XHTML 1.1 standards.  I had to recode literally every single page, in what was perhaps the biggest block of code I've had to edit.  (I learned just how big Lottery Post has become.)

(Nobody but I can see the new site - it only exists on a test environment at the moment.)

The recoding has been a huge learning process as well, as I was forced to learn a bunch of new techniques.  Lottery Post will truly be leading-edge design when it's finished. 

From a developer's perspective there are some very cool things, like completely table-less designs.  Every HTML coder learns to layout pages by creating a bunch of table tags, often nesting tables within tables within tables, in order to achieve the desired layout.  Table-less layouts do not use any tables at all to achieve the layout, instead relying on cascading style sheets (CSS) to position everything.

I have learned that coding completely with CSS is one of the most frustrating things you can do.  The thing that makes it so frustrating is that not one single browser brand has a bug-free implementation of CSS, and they each interpret code differently.  So when you finally get something working perfectly, you bring up the page on a different browser and it looks like garbage.  So then you have to go back and recode it again.  Then, it breaks on a third browser brand.  And so on until you get it working in every browser.  Pages even work different in different versions of the same brand of browser.

At this point I will be going through each page a second (and perhaps third) time, making more modifications.  But these changes will take nowhere near the amount of time as the first set of changes.  (I've been at this for about 3 months now.)

The ironically funny thing about this is that most people will look at the new site and say, "well, there's not much difference."  If that happens, in a strange way it will be a compliment to the work I've done, because the trick in this redesign is to make it appear the same as before.

However, there will be some very good changes (that I've mentioned before) like an all-new text editor.  Now, people will be able to create and edit tables right in the editor, and pasting stuff from other web sites will work better.  Plus, Firefox and Mozilla users will be able to edit using the rich text editor, and Safari is beginning to support it as well.  (The latest version of Safari has partial support.)

In all, a very exciting day for me personally, and a big relief to finally get to this point.