Restyling

I've made a small restyling of the site involving mostly the blog and the forum. Had to remind myself some of my old rusty CSS skills :-).

As usually I welcome criticism though, as usually, it's unlikely to change much :-). Not because I'm stubborn (which I am) but because such criticism tends to arise mainly from personal taste while I'm more interested in technological aspects. Besides, content is still the king.

Here's the summary of changes:

• Meta data is significantly reduced to the bare minimum (and sometimes beyond). For example at the top of a post there are only a link to the blog to which it relates and the publishing date: a context sufficient for a stranger reader coming to the post via a search link. A comment now has only the author's name — the time of posting doesn't add anything useful to the understanding of the message. And I delete useless necroposts anyway.

• Dropped right alignment for a number of elements. This is a step towards reducing the whole layout to a single column to be able to serve it to mobile devices with a bigger font size. By the way I'd appreciate a link to a good theory on how this is done these days.

• Reduced font size of headers and meta data. Gigantism is no good :-). Long topic headers at the forum were particularly hard to read.

• A rarely-used but decently supported by modern browsers display: inline-block suddenly came to my mind and I used it in most places instead of float: left to arrange blocks horizontally. Floats are (and always have been) an ugly hack and require using "clear" or non-standard overflows to keep things under control. Inline block doesn't suffer from all this. It just turns a block into a kind of jumbo letter sitting on the line and becomes subject to the nice tools like "vertical-align" for example. Very handy!

If anyone for some reason wants to look at the uncompressed CSS files, here the are: layout-general.css, layout-specific.css, fonts.css, colors.css, misc.css.