onderhond goes html5
The last redesign of my blog dates back to 2010, which in web terminology is somewhere between the birth of Christ and the Middle-Ages. For those of you who remember, I experimented with live iterative design, taking on pages and components one by one and gleefully accepting the mess it created in between. With 2012 looming before me, it's time to do some much-needed clean-up work and some minor touch-ups left and right, so brace yourself for a new period of live updates.
killing ie6
You might have noticed already, but the ie6 graph on my homepage has been consistently showing figures lower than 0.5% for four weeks now. Taking several variables into consideration (fewer works posts these past couple of weeks, gradual ie6 fade-out), I won't suspect it will ever rise above that marker again. That means that even before 2011 comes to an end I will be dropping complete ie6 support. I'm sorry for all of you who are still using ie6 to browse the web, but your group is too small to warrant all the extra work in my spare time.
This is also one of the main triggers to (finally) make the switch to html5 and to rely on more "advanced" css selectors (like the child-selector). Between that and cleaning up the mess that ie6 left behind, I assume it will be quite the chore to get everything back into order. On top of that, I'm also converting my css to less, so the resulting file should be a lot cleaner and easier to manage. For those of you wondering what will happen to the graph on the homepage, expect a new one to pop up the moment I axe the ie6 graph, displaying ie7 user stats of my site. That's the next browser that needs to disappear.
live iterative design
Like last time I will be fixing one component at a time, rather then launch a complete new site all at once. You can already see the result in the header and footer of this site, which have already been converted to html5 and feature some nicer hover effects than before. It's small things like these that will define the redesign.
It's quite impossible to do this without breaking some stuff along the way though. Currently the right column looks a little less styled than it should be due to changing my grid html structure (and finally fixing the ads properly). Small glitches like these will no doubt pop up once in a while, but I'll make sure the content will remain accessible and clean at all times. Just cut me some slack when I'm working on some of the bigger components.
so what is in it for you?
As a regular visitor you probably won't notice much of all these changes as most of them are happening behind the screens. Apart from some smaller visual changes and touch-ups left and right not all that much is planned to change.
Hopefully this site will come out a little leaner and should be a bit more responsive compared to the current one, at least that's what html5 and css3 promises anyway. I hope you'll enjoy the updates, as small as they may be, so here's too a fast and seamless attempt and live iterative design!