Musings

Now with 75% fewer <div>s!

Blogging has been light as of late. One of the reasons is that I’ve been doing a major site-overhaul. “What?” you say, “Your site looks completely unchanged.” Well, exactly.

While trying to write an alternate stylesheet — for reasons that I won’t get into right now — I came to realize that my job was made much more difficult by the existing markup. The MovableType default templates are a morass of nested <div>s and <span>s. On top of that, I had added my own layers of cruft. Wading in, I realized what a tour de force Mena’s CSS stylesheets are.

What to do? Get rid of the unnecessary nesting, use <ul>s for lists of stuff, rather than

<div>
item 1<br />
item 2<br />
...
</div>

and use <h*> for headers, rather than yet more <div>s.

Same visual effect, but much simpler and easier-to-work-with code.