What is Indigo Onion?
Indigo Onion is about stuff. Well, more specifically, it's supposed to be about Multimedia, but there's a little too mcuh other stuff (and to be honest, not enough Multimedia) to say it's a site about 'Multimedia'. I'm a graduate of Brunel University's 'BSc Multimedia Technology and Design' degree
The Look
Indigo Onion has gone through a degree of visual evolution over the past two years from a fairly flat box-based layout, through a brief period of rounded 3D lovelyness (complete with drop shadows) and now on to this compromise between the two. The motivation for this new style comes from my strong belief in complying with web standards and ensuring that my web pages are 'valid'.
The nice rounded graphical design (which is ultimately how I want Indigo Onion to look) just isn't possible right now with the standards as they are. Hopefully, as these standards progress and the technologies that drive them improve, I'll be able to implement my heavily graphical design without breaching web standards.
So what is it?
What you are now looking at is 100% structural, fully valid XHTML being formatted and layed out purely through valid CSS. It should work perfectly in all standards-complient browsers including Internet Explorer 6.0, Mozilla 1.0, Opera x.x and Netscape 6.2 - IE5.x should handle it pretty well too.
Theoretically, it will 'degrade gracefully' in older browsers like NS4, which don't properly support CSS layout and even a purely text-based browser like Lynx should display something that makes complete sense. If anyone uses an aural browser or screen reader, let me know how they cope with it!
How it works
Each page you see is basic XHTML. XHTML is the latest version of HTML which has been brought up-to-date to comply with the XML standards. I didn't need to use XHTML - HTML 4 is still perfectly valid - but I wanted to make the site future proof. I guess I'm a sucker for cutting edge.
Of course, fully valid XHTML can't really contain any information about formatting and layout, so to stop it looking completely dull (a bit like this), I've used CSS to apply formatting to the text and layout to the page. A basic formatting stylesheet is linked to the XHTML page with fonts and colours and such. This will work with any slightly CSS complient browser (Netscape 4, maybe older, and IE 3) to provide some kind of look and feel. Text-based browsers will ignore it and present something like the link above.
This basic stylesheet imports a more complex layout stylesheet which will then lay the page out in the two-column with header and footer design you (hopefully) see here. This works nicely with any properly CSS-complient browser (those listed earlier) but will completely mess up some semi-complient browsers. Fortunately, these old ones don't support importing, so they ignores the layout stylesheet and present a half-nice page. It's the best that can be done, really.
The Engine
Indigo Onion is now entirely PHP driven (well, kind of). I call it 'PHP assisted'. By that, I mean every page is run through the PHP preprocessor and parts of it might be based on dynamic information. However, it's not PHP driven in the traditional sense in that it's not a content management system. Most pages are still individual files on the server, but bits of the page, like the user panel and even the menu, are built in real time by the back-end engine.
I've chosen to avoid a database-driven content management system because they put a huge weight on the server and with the site as it is, there isn't really a need for one. Depending on how things pan out, I might make the engine play more part in things.
So what happens?
At the moment, the most significant dynamic bit is the user system. It provides
User Options
Sorry, but like the Grolsch, Indigo Onion's User functions are just not ready yet.
