New features in phroggy.com 5.0 include:
- All-new HTML code is now compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium's
HTML 4.01 Transitional
specification. I will be working toward HTML 4.01 Strict.
- Cleaner HTML should be easier for modern browsers to
understand, should work better for non-visual browsers,
and should use less bandwidth due to stylesheets being cached.
- Boxes now resize on the fly as you resize your browser window,
instead of only when a new page is loaded. I've gotten rid of the
nasty JavaScript hacks that used to make resizing work.
- ToolTips now display a description of the page a link goes to when
you mouseover the link. Previously, the description was displayed in
the window status bar using JavaScript (and didn't work in Safari).
- Updated Aqua theme is based on Mac OS X 10.3 “Panther”,
with alpha-channel transparent PNG drop-shadows. Now works with any background!
- Updated E theme also uses real transparency instead of dithering. Some
glitches that used to cause white text on a white background in a couple
places have been fixed.
- I've added twenty-eight new backgrounds,
stolen
borrowed from Windows 95 and 2000.
- New icons at the top of the home page should make navigation
easier. These are dynamic, so I can easily make changes.
- New dynamic navigation menu should look exactly the same as the old
static navigation menu, but it's now much easier for me to make changes.
The current page is now indicated in the menu by not being a link.
Also, in the Simple layout, the current theme is indicated the same way.
- More bits and pieces of text are localized for different languages.
Set your preferred languages in your browser's settings and see what happens.
Contact me if you'd like to help with translations.
- Plenty of internal code changes - it's still all undocumented, but it should
be possible to start documenting now, if I get bored enough. Previously it was
such a mess of hacks on top of hacks that I couldn't begin to document it if I
wanted to.
Unfortunately, older browsers that don't support CSS at all won't
display the site as nicely as they used to with the old HTML code, although
the text should be perfectly readable. Browsers with partial or broken
support for CSS may have weird problems, ranging from boxes on the home
page being 100% width in Internet Explorer 5 for Windows (this is fixed in
IE6), to the site being basically unusable in Netscape 4. Browsers that
don't support PNGs with alpha-channel transparency (most notably Internet
Explorer for Windows, and Internet Explorer for Mac seems to be buggy) will
not display the new Aqua theme correctly, and boxes in the E theme won't be
transparent.
I recommend upgrading your browser to the newest version available,
or switching to a better one if you have problems. Of course, if something
doesn't look right and you think it might be my fault, please
let me know; I've been fixing bugs for the
past few days and probably haven't gotten all of them.
For those of you interested in the code, yes, I promise I will release
it. I'm busy at the moment, and I've been waiting to see what bugs there
are, but I will release it soon.