Who You Calling A Jesse?

I have been working on the not-so-secret revamp of CPA pages and general news pages over the past couple of weeks. Due to the content layout this has meant some creative CSS and diving into fonts.

I have also been playing around with some XHTML/CSS and DWT for a DevNet article. The test page is pretty cool (to me) as I have achieved the same CLF-dwt-like behavior but with floats instead of absolutely positioned elements. How I managed that will have to wait until the article is published (or you can look at the source code).

As I have been working on both things I have been asking myself: Why do we need so many directories in web sites? The goal with the CPA site is to flatten our pages, get you to the content faster… in a couple weeks you can judge how I did. But every couple of hours I seem to be asking myself – “what was I thinking when I stuck [insert directory name or file here] there.”

So back to the CSS, how many annoying things have you run into with CLF CSS? I have two things that are really driving me nuts (I created the stuff too):

• UW3col.css is defining font-size: 80% in the #primarycontent, why? It should be in UWblank.css.
• too many #secondnavarea and #secondnav control in UWblank.css – it should be in UW3col.css.

…and I have a couple XHTML complaints:

• Navigation should be brought into #primarycontarea and floated
• #pagecontainer should have always been there

If I changed those, the CSS would be much better. The XHTML changes would be huge actually… I can’t believe how smooth that template works that I made for DevNet. It has been a year since I built the template, I am much better with CSS now. What do you find annoying with the CSS and XHTML of the CLF?