Online

Apart from the last 2 years, I have always worked offline. I never liked table-based HTML layouts, which may be one reason I never worked as a web designer. A web page formatted with CSS appeals to me much more, and that is what inspired this portfolio site. I try to shed light on some of the problems that come up during my work. I hope the structure of the site is clear; my web page designs went under the Graphics heading - for now they don't deserve a menu item of their own.

The site was made simply with a text editor. But I plan to build a CMS behind it.

It is quite an adventure to reach this far back in time. In a way my life is like a fantasy gamebook: countless branches and decisions, and only at the end do you find out whether you went the right way.

Embedding Flash

Using Adobe's Flash embedding script, I built the Flash animations into the page like this:

<div class=anim> <script language="javascript"> anim('Korforgas','222','575') </script> </div>

swf name:Korforgas
width:222
height:575
This method assumes that JavaScript is enabled. I will soon add a <noscript> part with an img in it - that's the plan ... more details later ...

Hack-free CSS for Opera, Firefox and IE

I am not an HTML-obsessed page builder. I really don't like HTML code - although things have improved a bit in the last few days. I used to find it needlessly complicated. Luckily we have the wonderful CSS, with which - in theory, and fortunately in practice too, after a few weeks of struggle (respect to those who manage it faster) - you can write a web page with a plain text editor, in a way that keeps both the page and the CSS source readable.

It is easy to get unexpected results while formatting an HTML page. The solution is to set the page's DOCTYPE correctly: in both Opera and IE it determines which method the browser uses to interpret your CSS code.

This is what worked for me:
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd" >
Opera 9 DOCTYPE Switches Pick out the one that suits you from here.

The next quest: how to embed Flash into HTML code as nicely as possible ...

Notepad ++ a simple, light and fast text editor

I have been using this free, small but very versatile text editor for 3 years and I am completely satisfied with it. I write almost everything in it, mostly program code - for that it is unbeatable for me. True, it doesn't give as much help for a given programming language as Eclipse, but it loads much faster and runs fine even on a 300 MHz laptop. And once you set up the keyboard shortcuts that suit you best, it really takes off.

The HTML and CSS code of this site was of course also written in Notepad ++. Besides plain txt files it knows countless formats (Flash ActionScript, PHP, XML, C++, SQL, Python, ... ). It handles ASCII and UTF encodings well too, not to mention its code folding. Small, fast and easy to customize - that's why I chose it, for programming as well.

Try Notepad ++! (download)