RandomCake

Another neat thing you can do with PHP which is similar to this is actually have the menu write its self! I used to have a website which used .txt files (contained html, but weren't full html pages, so .htm/.html didn't seem appropriate!) for the content which were listed in the menu, the site worked quite well with the only requirement being PHP and no need for a database! It's fairly basic stuff but if anyone is learning and interested I could post the PHP.

Well, the main problems were with IE6, which no matter who you listen to is still either the most popular or second most popular browser on the planet. I wasn't planning on supporting any further back than 6 really to be honest, but the layout just wouldn't work with IE6 without a ridiculous amount of tweaking, and, well, do you think a corporate client is going to accept that their website is just a load of plain text in older browsers? And in not so old browsers stuff isn't how it should be... t Also, once I decided to give old versions of IE(no other browser receives the tables layout, it's only old versions of IE that are still stuck or corporate networks across the world! Not Netscape) a different layout it only took about 30 minutes to completely adapt the original design to a tables layout which pretty much matches the full CSS/xHTML layout exactly with only a few tiny minor differences! To be honest, I don't *want* my website to drop back to being unstyled, I may know that it's the users fault for not updating their browser 5 years ago, but they don't, and I want them to buy my services, and their customers certainly won't be happy going to a website only for it to not look right, again, they won't blame their browser, they'll blame me and my client! So, this method has given me a valid XHTML1.1 and CSS website, with no hacks at all which, while some might validate, aren't really valid are they? So, really what I want to know is: What disadvantage does this technique have other than the time it took to implement?

Interesting reading! Anyone know any other design sites along these lines? I tried to find another to post, but can't seem to find any!

Hi, I've been into web design for years, but only over the past two years have I started to learn standards compliment web design and begun to get into PHP and other web-programming languages. Anyway, on my re-coded website I've used some server side coding to serve a non-standard table layout to versions of internet explorer older than version 7. Now, the primary site which users on modern web browsers (IE7, FF, Opera) will all see a standards compliant website, but the older ones will see a table based layout, but screen readers, robots and any other sort of software that's in the business of reading websites will not see the ugly tables! So, here's my question (well 2 really..), what sort of things do other people do to ensure backwards compatibility back to the dawn of time? And what is performing stuff like this considered 'okay' by standards people? Here's the website: www.redfoxdesign.co.uk Thanks for reading!