For those of you who use CSS in web design (or have been following its evolution), you may remember the battle cry of "tables are dead" from a few years ago, which was soon followed by rallying cry "Long live tables!" According to the thinking (and gurus) at the time, EVERYTHING that could be done with a table could be done with div layout and a little creativity. In spite of the fact that tables can easily resolve some very tricky problems and can be styled with CSS, tables are still kind of a dirty word in web design.

Nifty little online workshop about XML in Libraries -- very well organized and easy to follow. Covers the basics of XML to writing XML, with lots of exercises. http://infomotions.com/musings/xml-in-libraries/

I love all of these handy little web tools online. Just in case you really feel the need to use tables, you can CSS 'em, here.

Although I still have lots more work to do it, I managed to get drupal upgraded to 6.1. As I stated in one of my previous drupal posts, the difference between 4.7(? I think that was my latest version pre-upgrade) and 6.1 is amazing. It looks like on the "to do" list for the upcoming upgrades is a WYSIWYG theme editor. Whoa. Would that it ever make it easy to use Drupal! The only real problems that I had with Drupal was that my custom created theme using the Zen theme module (nod to CSS Zen Garden) didn't work. Oh, and I then had to re-do my modules.Anyhow.

For those unfamiliar with Drupal it is a largescale opensource CMS for a website which is used by the likes of Tim Berners-Lee. Drupal is scalable and modular built which even includes design elements. Each Drupal website is like a house built out of legos -- just like legos fit together to create something (a working door, a roof, etc.) which then creates the overall house, the modules fit together to create larger functionality, which in turn, creates the website. Sounds confusing? Not really these days.

So, I decided I would put all of Powerpoint handout stuff into my website to make it a little more interactive and interesting than just downloading a Word doc. I couldn't quite figure out how to dump a Word doc into drupal and in looking around on the messageboard I discovered I was 2 versions behind anyhow. Isn't that the way of the world? Anyhow, I upgraded to the latest version, and wow, is it a BILLION times better. My only complaint so far, is that I am having problems getting the Zen template (based upon CSS Garden!) to work.

I'm re-doing one of my domains with textpattern or wordpress. I considered drupal, but to be honest, I want something with a little stronger 3rd party support. There are several features & functionalities missing in drupal which I need. For a site from scratch or one with content generated from within drupal, all is well. For those working with 3rd party apps already, well, it may or may not work (or even be available).Drupal templating is also notoriously tough to work with, although with the new css zen template, it is easier to give it a look which is not straight out of the box.