I went through and converted my old Blogger template to use CSS instead of tables a while back. I basically just changed each individual item from the old method to the new, standard method. I had some minor issues with it, and it was still pretty cluttered.

So the other day I went through and rewrote the template from scratch. Excluding the Blogger-specific include tags, my template file validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. It looks almost exactly like the original (some changes I actually prefer, but could do like the original). I’m rather proud of that, considering how it started out, and the fact that I never learned CSS proper.

The template itself is much simpler now. Rather than having odd things nested all over the place, the document is structured more clearly with less stuff mixed in. The external stylesheet means I can change the layout much more easily, and add alternate options. The whole page should be much easier to maintain now.

I’m having some issues with PHP includes, and some of my posts aren’t valid individually, so invisibill.net itself doesn’t validate, but I know exactly where the problems are, and they’re very minor. But the base template for the page is valid!