Last week Dan Boyarski popped his head into class, pointed to me, and told me to see him after class. So I did.

He wanted to know if I could help out with maintaining and updating the Emergence Conference website that the School of Design is hosting September 8?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú10. Sure, I said. Even with the time I was spending photographing my classmates?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ homes last week, I could not pass up the opportunity to get involved.

The site and the conference are being put together by last year?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s students, who are currently scattered throughout the country at their respective internships. This makes communication and collaboration a challenge.

Essentially, Jim Brommer supplies me with content, and Susan Dybbs provides direction on where to put the content, and what technical changes to make.

One of my first tasks was to standardize all of the pages and strip them of tables (The horror! The horror!). There were three slightly different layouts that I combined into one Dreamweaver template. I rebuilt the style sheet and brought the site into web standard compliance, and then applied the template to all pages. This made Susan (and me) happy.

I also employed sIFR for the page headers in place of the images that were being used because it was annoying to create a new image for new pages.

Those changes have made the process of updating the content and adding new pages a lot easier. Where possible, I have also tweaked some of the content organization to work better on the web. Still, there are some problems with the information architecture. Also, I think a stronger IA plan from the start would have helped produce a stronger design.

Regardless, I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m having fun showing off my web and CSS skills. I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m not sure why, but I get a lot of pleasure converting a table-based design to CSS. And that, my friends, makes me a pretty big nerd in my book.

Tonight I was asked to look into the code of a couple sites to figure out the proficiency and tools of the developers/companies that built the sites. This is the second time I have been asked to do this in the past few weeks.

I’m used to looking at the latest and best code examples because that’s the type of code I want to look at, and that’s the type of code that the companies and persons I follow develop. So it’s interesting to look at code that is not developed to the latest standards and try to figure out what’s going on.

I found myself digging through the code, searching for logic, trying to understand the progress. Certain usages of CSS would tell me something about the developer’s exposure and understanding. The tables and embedded javascript would show me a lack of advancement.

An overall observation was the prevalence of a table/CSS middle ground. All the sites I looked at were table based. But the use of CSS wasn’t the CSS of a few years ago, with classes everywhere and no IDs. There were some obvious nods to current practices, but the CSS was oddly crossbred with tables.

My assumption is that there’s enough discussion about CSS these days that even those who are very slow to change (the majority) are recognizing the shift, but are not fully committing, either because they don’t understand how it works, or they’re afraid to completely give up tables, or both.

Another observation is that of sites I have looked at built with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, they have all been table-based interspersed with CSS. What gives?

I wish I could talk to the developers to learn their CSS philosophy. Where did they get their information? Are there sites out there that teach the benefits of a table-CSS hybrid structure? (I hope not.) Wouldn’t they rather work with leaner code?

Alas, I will not be having those conversations. I can only dig through the published code and speculate.

I’m a day late and a few million dollars short, as CSS Naked Day was yesterday.

If you’re here, you might have read my post at Wanton Spirit. So you know what’s up and how this is all part of my plan to take over the world. A plan for which there are no functional specs. Jason Fried would be proud.

Rather than bust my ass creating a new design for this site, I decided (somewhat in honor of CSS Naked Day) to strip all styles and roll with it.

Then, as I have time, I will add styles. And through iteration, I will arrive at a design that no alien has ever seen!

(which may, or may not, look like pooh)

Anyway, welcome, whether you are totally new, or one of the faceless 3,000.

To celebrate this momentous occasion, I am partaking in some gin and tonic. Can you tell?