I would miss target=blank as well. The thing is (and no browser currently does it afaik), the whole “I don’t like how the site is opening this page” can be solved by a simple context-menu entry that says “open page in same tab/window” right above the “open page in new tab/window” entries.

My website is not fully compliant. … I think I pass HTML 4.0 transitional, but XHTML 1.0 and beyond, forget about it!

I’m only going for Transitional here. At the time I started, I don’t know if any browsers rendered Strict correctly. Also, Strict doesn’t allow target=”_blank”. I don’t know why they got rid of it. I guess they felt that gave the designer too much control over the user’s browser. I don’t want to send people away from my site until they’re done reading the article.

A lot of the problems with the CSS on this site could be fixed by changing the actual HTML tags (mainly the order in which they appear), but I’m guessing you have no control over that, am I correct in that assumption?

Most of the HTML is generated by WordPress. There’s a little bit embedded in some PHP files, but I can’t figure out how to edit those. The PHP sends control in a zillion different directions, so I can’t tell when it’s going to do something or even be guaranteed what it will do.

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Okay those definitely are formatted correctly. Depending on what is seen when I hit post will tell us the answer!

My website is not fully compliant. I wanted it to be really badly when I started, but there are so many third party plugins I use (forums, blog, etc.) that by the time I was finished, it failed the tests. I think I pass HTML 4.0 transitional, but XHTML 1.0 and beyond, forget about it! I think the W3C has really good intentions, but constantly deprecating tags is not a good way to get a standard adopted, in my opinion. XHTML is a remarkably good standard, but it Breaks The Web (TM) for all the older sites trying to adopt it (and newer ones too that are working around browser quirks).

Unless they were starting the web from scratch, they should have left in all the old standard tags and even the de facto standard tags, as long as they were XML compliant. For example, you can’t have XML compliance using the &ltbr&gt tag unless you integrate the closing slash into the tag, so it should be &ltbt /&gt. And that’s fine! That’s an easy find-and-replace. But why, oh why, did they do away with the <center> tag, along with all the other zillion incredibly useful tags introduced by the industry over the years?!?! It’s not as if any of the browsers can stop supporting those tags. If they did, 80% of the web sites out there would not render correctly. Even the most standards compliant browser in existence, Opera, renders those old tags!

But I digress…

A lot of the problems with the CSS on this site could be fixed by changing the actual HTML tags (mainly the order in which they appear), but I’m guessing you have no control over that, am I correct in that assumption?

Oh, btw, I should mention the CSS I’m posting here has been tested. IE8 has a more advanced version of the IE Developer Tools integrated right in the browser. Anyway, I can go in and fiddle directly with the CSS on your site and see the results in real-time. It’s pretty awesome!

That’s phenomenal. That would have saved me at least one weekend.

You might be able to do a negative padding “-1 em” on the blockquote to match the positive margin set by the paragraph. But that doesn’t work in the Developer Tool here in IE8. Negative values, I believe, are not standards-compliant, but I’m not 100% sure. Also, IE8 is a buggy beta, so it might just be that.

That doesn’t work in Safari either. Also, I’d prefer not to go non-standard, considering how much I’ve been railing against people who code their sites non-standardly (and the browsers that encourage that).

I’ve had that W3C HTML button on the site since the beginning (which I still need to restore). There’s a similar tester for CSS, but I don’t use it, since (at least in the past and probably still) I wouldn’t know how to fix it if the site were out.

As for blockquotes, in the BLOCKQUOTE tag in the CSS file, changing the padding-(direction) to a smaller value to decrease the space on the inside of the quote and margin-(direction) to change the spacing on the outside.

Playing with it… What’s odd is that padding-bottom is already 0 and there is still space… Ah! There is a P tag inside the blockquote. That always adds space to the bottom (separate the paragraphs). To fix that, you need to create a new style for that P tag inside the blockquote. But if you do that, the problem is that if you have multiple paragraphs, they will run together. This is a toughy!

You might be able to do a negative padding “-1 em” on the blockquote to match the positive margin set by the paragraph. But that doesn’t work in the Developer Tool here in IE8. Negative values, I believe, are not standards-compliant, but I’m not 100% sure. Also, IE8 is a buggy beta, so it might just be that.

The comment number is smushing together with the user name in IE8.

I haven’t seen that in the browsers I’ve tested with. I’ll play with that when I have some time.

The comments tend to sort of run together visually, to me.

That bothers me, too. I was just thinking of adding a little space between them. I’ll have to think about a background image. You’ll notice that the posts themselves use something at the bottom. Maybe I could use that, or a variation on it. I’d like the comments to not look exactly like the posts.

BTW, the blockquotes have too much space between the text and the border. I can’t get that any narrower. Do you have any brilliant solutions for that?

New formatting issue (not a huge one)… The comment number is smushing together with the user name in IE8. Anybody else seeing this or is it just IE8? Anyway, it can be fixed by moving the CITE over some pixels. Create a “#content .post .content OL LI CITE” and set a value padding-left: 15px.

Also, if you could use a background image that has a horizontal line or maybe a fading background gradient of some sort to separate the comments, it might be easier on the eyes (to me anyway). The comments tend to sort of run together visually, to me. You can add the background tag to “#content .post .content OL LI” to achieve this.

Sorry to be such a backseat CSS driver!

I’ll take your tips on the CSS and fiddle with it.

Making cross-browser menus out of ULs is not rocket science, so I think the person who wrote the theme you downloaded made a mistake that firefox is forgiving of, but other browsers are not.

Actually, it doesn’t work perfectly in any browser. I was going to research this next weekend and see what the deal is.

Honestly, though, I don’t really see the need for the top menu at all.

I sort of have it in mind to customize it. It would probably be a subset of the links on the right. Because of its prominent position, it would be good for emphasizing certain things. I might make a best-of page, for example, so people who are new to the blog could read my rare good posts instead of the crap I shovel out most of the time.

Will there be a listing of the most recently-commented-on articles on the main home page as before? If not, no biggie.

It is a biggie. A lot of people use it. I’m still hoping to fix that tonight. Hopefully Tuesday night. I’m having to work extra hours this week.

Actually, I’m not seeing the “Manage your subscriptions” link here.

I’ll try to fix that within the week.