Transparency

I must confess that I committed a sin against good webdesign yesterday.

It was the futuristic blue glass look of this theme that did it. I had barely managed to make the CSS validate when I turned right around and broke it by adding the (non-standard) Mozilla property "opacity" to make the layers transparent.

Not only that, but today I realized that making the text box almost half transparent in front of a blue background makes the text really hard to read, especially the blue links.

So I made a compromise: The text box is now again opaque and well-readable, while the side bar is see-through. And let's face it - with the work I've been doing on the "printable version" stylesheet (which you can try out by viewing the Print Preview in your browser), I figure I deserve to use a tiny little non-standard property.

The printable version does away with transparency, background and sidebars, and prints mostly black on white. It also does away with various navigation links and the result is a nicely formatted A4 page. With CSS2, I even put the URLs of hyperlinks in brackets, so you can still see where they go after they're transferred to paper. Which is good, because paper is notoriously unclickable.