Dream

My brand new and shiny personal website is almost done! Goodbye, plain layout—not that the other one is that elaborate. Hello, more meness!

Meness: state of that which is me. Some things that have a very high meness are tea, sushi and Tim Burton. Some things with a low level of meness are coffee, dirt and white socks.

That said, my cat is utterly crazy. She jumps up, trying to catch a hole in the wall. Yes, a whole. Up to now, she has failed.

Yesterday, a gorgeous…I mean sexy…err, good, friend of mine has come to visit. She actually let him strike her and she lied between the two of us. She won’t even let my brother-in-law, whom I live with, approach her. And when people come to visit, she hides from them, although she never really goes far from me. It must be a signal: he passed the quintessential cat test.

Never drink alone. Never drink alone. Never drink alone. Always with friends. No more than once or twice a week. Never alone. Throw away this strawberry liquor. Now. The warmth is not reassuring. It’s worrisome. Think of your dad and throw this stuff away. Now. You can write a summary about an alcoholic without drinking. You go, girl.

The website mentioned in my previous post (”I Hate Tables”) was not strictly a tutorial website, more of an every-thing-you-can’t-think-of-putting-on-a-site website. It was Mellow Kisses. They also do reviews.

That said, I’m down. Really. Not in a good mood. Trying to motivate myself because I have to be in school in an hour for a group work I really don’t feel like doing. Must take a shower first.

My post from yesterday seems to have been kidnapped by the internet mutants. So here we go again.

Everyone must know that I hate misuses of tables. “Table layouts” are the most common example: website owners use the HTML table element to create their layout. I never really got it—including way back then, when I tried making one and just couldn’t make something interesting. Using a table sounds not only terribly wrong, but also terribly limiting and, I must say, strange.

When I think of a table, I think of a series of rows and columns that hold and display information. They belong to the “scheme” area of our brain, the little part of us that synthesizes everything. Layouts, on the other side, are part creativity part scheming—the layouts I make, at least, although the one currently here isn’t exactly creative. Anyway, back on topic: a layout is the way you organize the different areas of a web page. This organization will ideally take into consideration usability, accessibility and aesthetics. In order to create a layout that will have all of these qualities, one should, inside one’s mind at first, divide the contents of said page into various sections: the main content area, the navigation, the footer, the extra stuff and, in some cases, the main decorative image, most of the time a “header image”. After this division inside one’s mind, one can proceed to actually divide the page the same way through markup in order to achieve the three points mentioned above.

Where would a table come into this process? A layout doesn’t display tabular data. You aren’t looking at statistics, at a list of phone numbers or whatever. You are looking at a bloody website.

Anyway, that said, there is something even worse. There is the use of tables for absolutely every single element of the website, like tables were the atoms of the web.

I was reading Rhiannon’s latest reviews and I discovered a website offering tutorials for which I cannot think of a soft adjective that would describe how much I was ashamed to think that some people actually write this. It is not even a tutorial, actually, just a snippet of markup with an explanation of what it does. Or rather, part of what it does, as I will demonstrate. In order to create glowing text:

<TABLE STYLE="filter:GLOW(color=COLOR NAME, strength=3)">
<TR><TD><center>
YOUR TEXT HERE</TR></TD></TABLE>

I’ll skip the fact that it is in uppercase and is displayed inside a textarea which, in the end, doesn’t matter compared to all of the crap you can find in this. First, it is proprietary to Internet Explorer (and a rather pointless effect). Plus, the markup does two major things that are not even mentioned by the creator. First, it centers the text; and it does it with a deprecated tag that is not even closed. Then, it is inside a bloody table. Why the fuck is there a table around there? What, tell me, is inside this tiny little piece of markup that could resemble something you’d expect to find in a table?

I was utterly bored by the end of Tuesday morning because of one my teachers, who was not exactly entertaining and teaches a rather boring class. Yesterday, I got a bit more interesting classes, mostly the Cinema and Television one. I had subscribed to it because it was pretty much the only class where there were still places left when I subscribed (which is surprising, considering there are 172 students in it). I was sure it would bore me to death and I even thought of abandoning it so I could change groups in another class. It was however quite fun and I’m looking forward for a lot of upcoming lessons.

Today, however, I got a very interesting class given by a dynamic teacher, Quebec actor Marcel Sabourin. I’ll always be looking forward for Friday, 4pm.

Note that I’m also seeing Nicolas in this class, so it quadruples my euphoria, at least.