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Dominant Negative, Web Template

This template was the original template used at Skinyourscreen.com on opening day an for approximately the first 6 months. It was my first actual web-template, in practice and principle. I had never set myself to coding web-templates previously and did this one by significantly modifying an existing Mambo template at the time. This becomes exceptionally evident by the lack of any adherence to modern web-standards and accessible design parameters.

Although the template worked quite well at the time, in hindsight there are several things about this template that would preclude me using it in a production environment again:

• Table-based design - The whole template relies on nested templates within templates to perform all the simple graphical layouts and positioning.
• Table-based templates are a pain to code and modify.
• Table-based templates are a nightmare of markup.
• Table-based templates take significantly longer to load than table-less designs.
• Table-based templates are NOT accesibility-minded, i.e.: people with disabilities (sight- or hearing-impaired) typically cannot easily navigate table-based templates using teletype or auditory browsing methods.
• Table-based designs generally break when text is resized.
• Table-based templates are indicative of web-coding practices used in the early 90s and do not accurately represent modern web-design.
• This template lacks clean, semantic markup.
• Mambo, at the time, made use of MANY odd and unnecessary DIV elements to contain and style various pieces of information.
• Most of those unnecessary DIV elements could have been coded using proper CSS ancestry profiles using existing HTML elements.
• I had no clue what I was really doing when constructing this template besides replacing graphics and graphics dimensions.
• My CSS styling and typography in this template really suck!
• Although it was my first real exposure to CSS and the customization it offers, this theme is sorely lacking for CSS readability.