Stylesheets

As developed and used throughout the years

What do I see here?

This page is a showcase for various stylesheets that I once used for my site. If you have a good browser, you can see them influence the looks of this page by activating them through the menu of your browser.

Brief history

I have the current site on-line since at least 2003¹⁾. Since then many things have changed in looks and layout. Every time I felt like it, I just changed the look and feel, sometimes completely.

In the first year I had to learn how to structure a document properly. I didn't save any of the style templates I used back then, since I couldn't apply them to my current pages anyway.

But somewhere soon after that first year on-line I recreated my site (reusing the content), used proper markup to do so, and then focussed on developing a new stylesheet. From May 2004 on I've created various looks, some of which didn't last very long.

Of those stylesheets I lost one I remember: the one that was up for about a month in or around December 2004. I have no idea what I did with that stylesheet and I have no means of retreiving or restoring it.

Styles, overview

Too bad, since I did keep many of the others. The stylesheets I used (and managed to save), are:

1. work in progress
2. current
3. until March 2006
4. until November 2005
5. December 2004
6. from May 2004
7. August 2003
8. Previous, with different page structure

Use those stylesheets on current page

You can see any and all of them effect this page. If you have a browser that allows you to, you can activate any of the stylesheets I've mentioned here. Two browsers for Windows I know off that allow you to change between stylesheets, are recent versions of Opera and Firefox.

Using the older stylesheets may cause mistakes in rendering, especially in positioning. That is mainly because I did not stop to tweak the structural template of the pages as well (along with the stylesheets), so some minor things have changed. That causes some styles to trip and break, because handles are no longer available or were added but have no use in older stylesheets.

Purpose?

This page served a purpose for myself in the first place: just to check and look at what I'd cooked up previously, before I went on to create yet another look. Also to provide myself with a splendid trip on memory lane (Oh, some struggles. You wouldn't believe! ) It is sort of a log of changes through time.

It too gives other people some insight in how I think when developing pages for my website. It shows that sometimes I just want a color change. Other times I throw the bits and pieces about a bit, like going from a vertical menu bar to a horizontal menu bar.

But hardly ever anything drastic happens. I seem to be quite satisfied with the general structure and layout of my pages. Good for me .

Note

As usual you can't do a thing useful with all these stylesheets if you use Internet Explorer as your browser. You have to have a browser that supports active stylesheet switching, like (my favourite) Opera or (another good one) Firefox. Go get yourself one of those. They're free, small, fast and safe, and they render pages much better (implementing the standards better) than Internet Explorer does. What else do you want? Go for it.

If you like this page, you could look into other testing pages on webdesign, or some great examples of creative use of CSS I've implemented in my site. My site is largely in Dutch, but the coding never is , of course. That speaks for itself.