Welcome!
This is Gila, my
fifth design on OSWD.
In the tradition of my previous two designs, Gila was inspired by the look of a pre-existing
website. Gila’s inspiration was the website of
ActiveState, an open-source application development
company. The name Gila is a play
on the word: Komodo, the
name of one of ActiveState’s products which is based on
the Mozilla project.
Features of This Design
- Standards compliant
- Gila is 100% compliant with
XHTML 1.0 Strict and
CSS 2 for more consistent browser
rendering. The design is also XHTML 1.1-ready, merely requiring an
XML declaration and a change of
DTD.
- Layout without tables
- Unlike this design’s inspiration, Gila does not use tables for layout purposes.
This stems from my personal conviction that tables should only be used to display tabular
data.
More Features of This Design
- Relative metrics
- Most measurements (such as widths and spacings) are font-size relative. This means that
if a viewer changes the page’s default font size, the document metrics also change
to compensate.
- Separate stylesheet for color scheme
- All the colors of this design are defined in their own stylesheet. Thus, you can generate
several versions of this stylesheet which define different color schemes for your
webpage. To change your page’s colors, simply replace the color scheme stylesheet
with a different version.
Final Notes
The look of my last three designs
(this one inclusive) have all been based on published pages. This is because I am artistically
challenged, as evidenced by my first
two designs!
The main reason why I submit designs to OSWD is to show that
webpages can be rewritten in XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS, without tables, and not loose too much
with respect to “look & feel”.
I hope you find Gila useful. If you use this design or derive inspiration from it,
please let me know so that I may
have a look at your website.