Upgraded WordPress to 1.0.1 “Miles”
Upgraded to WordPress 1.0.1 “Miles” release this evening. Modified the index.php file first so it conforms to my tablelized version. Copied the files to the server, overlaying the existing wordpress directory. Ran the upgrade script. Got multiple MySQL errors. Decided to ignore them and login to see what happens. Seems to be me okay, but I guess this post will tell.
The site design still needs a little tweaking as it’s not displaying correctly.
Tweaked the wp-layout.css file and finally figured out the previous version was needed to create the correct table layout. Since I’d saved the files, replacing the 1.0.1 wp-layout.css with the old (version 1.0) wp-layout.css did trick. Tweaking the wp-layout.css file consisted of replacing a one color with a darker color, so the links are more legible, rather than a pale gray.
Why use a table based layout, particularly if you’re concerned with forward compatibility as your blog name indicates.
Hi Matt! Thanks for your comment. The reason I had to switch to a table-based layout is that I found early on when I first started using WordPress that the pure CSS layout would not display correctly on two different computers both running Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6.x. Don’t ask me why. Common sense would tell you that this shouldn’t happen, but it did. Yes, my blog is playfully concerned with forward compatibility, but more importantly, with backward compatability (preservation of what is, not what’s to come). I have some books on XHTML and one of them even has a chapter section titled “The Importance of Tables.” I don’t think tables will break with either forward or backward compatibility. Any new browser will continue to have to support the display of tables, either directly or through some other parse-through or HTML/XHTML transform method, simply because so many Web sites, including the hundreds of thousands already archived as part of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, continue to make use of them. So I would turn the question back to you and recommend that you supply two index.php templates: one with pure CSS and other with a table layout + CSS. Thanks again for your WordPress work! It’s great stuff.
2004-02-17: Wanted to add that we’re probably talking the same thing when it comes to forward compatibility, but in different contexts. I understand the need to want to make the template as cutting-edge as possible, but there are no guarantees that even the total CSS solution will survive or be more widespread a decade from now. It’s more important for me now to display my WordPress site as accurately as possible on all browsers, rather than just those that can correctly render the CSS.