On Styles and Standardized Templates
Six Apart and others have closed out submissions on the style contest they've been running. I'm not much of designer though I still made a contribution with my own brand of geeky humor.
I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed in that I had hoped for more adaptable and reusable styles that I could make use of in my work. Unlike Six Apart's Byrne Reese, I was excited to see the classic Kubrick design originally by Michael Heilemann ported into the Six Apart standard form. Admittedly Kubrick and its numerous derivations it is a bit overused, but its just so versitile and classic. I actually used the contest style for something I was doing recently. I learned a bit of the hard way that the stylesheet needs some work though. (Oh well.)
I am glad for the contest though because it made me really dig into the Six Apart standard templates and get to know them. After having spent some time with them building my submission, I had -- they aren't as hard as they seem and they do make sense. They also seemed to make cross-browser compatibility easier to achieve having many of the trick and hacks to working around different browser quirks handled. This all assumes that you are not after a look like no other weblog, of course, but for most of us that is just fine and a valueable resource.
One thing I did find a bit puzzling is how the standard templates make almost gratuitous use of CSS ID and class attributes when semantic XHTML techniques could have been applied.
It will be interesting to see which styles the judges select later this month.
