Lambda Chi Alpha’s conference, called General Assembly, is to be held in Indianapolis, Indiana, July 29-31 – just three weeks away! My goal is to build a demo of our new site, with two or more CSS designs. I have a lot of work ahead of me.
Since the entire site is going to use a single XHTML template with PHP includes for various blocks of content, I only have to build one full set of content. But I will have to use the exact same foundation of code to support multiple CSS designs. I’m kind of setting up a CSS Zen Garden of my own. This is going to test my skills.
In coming up with some fluid CSS design ideas I noticed a few nice trends in browser statistics.
- Mozilla is gaining ground over Internet Explorer
- The use of IE5 is declining at a fast pace, reaching 8.1% in July. This is great news since it has buggy CSS support. IE6 is also loosing ground, but at a slow pace. So where is everyone going? The answer is Mozilla/Firefox, which has rapidly climbed to 12.2%.
- Screen Size
- The current trend is that more and more computers are using a screen size of 1024×768 pixels. Sadly, nearly 40% are still stuck at 800×600.
- Color Depth
- The current trend is that more and more computers use 24 or 32 bits hardware to display 16,777,216 different colors. Thirty percent have only 65,536 colors. The good news is fewer than four percent are viewing the web from a 256 color (8-bit) computer system, which means I’m not going to bind myself to the browser-safe color palette of 216 colors.