Nidahas » Musings on design, web standards and free software from a Sri Lankan geek.

Rebooted

2006.04.30

I’ve embraced earthy hues with this version of Nidahas, the first redesign of the site after the initial version that got me vaulted (realigned later), and helped me make friends with some very smart people. I loved the Sri Lankanness of that design, but was never really happy with the n00b markup or the occasional lack of attention to important details. Although I’m no Tantek, the markup and source order of this theme is definitely something I’m quite satisfied with.

One noticeable change is the introduction of two main categories of posts: thoughts and notes. I must admit that it’s a total ripoff of Whitespace (Thanks Scrivs!). My reasons are the same: often there’ll be something I want to make a quick note about, but let the discussion happen elsewhere. Notes are such short semi-daily posts, where comments are closed. Why notes, not a link blog? Because I’m not a good referential blogger.

The Kandy Theme

Like the previous version, this design too is based on the Sinhala art of the Kandyan era (16th to 18th centuries). I love the simplicity and elegance of the folk art of this last truly independant era of Sri Lankans; our national art didn’t survive the century of colonial rule that followed.

Instead of talking about my obsession with Kandy, let me quote that excellent scholar, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, whose classic Medieaval Sinhalese Art still is one of the most authoritative guides to the Art of our forgotten past:

Mediaeval Sinhalese Art was the art of a people for whom husbandry was the most honourable of all occupations, amongst whom the landless man was a nobody, and whose ploughmen spoke as elegantly as courtiers. It was a religious art, and so a popular art. It was also essentially a national art; the craftsmen, forming an integral part of the Civil Service, were rewarded with grants of State land, no less than soldiers or husbandmen. It was the art of a people whose kings were ‘one with the religion and the people,’ - perhaps the most significant phrase in the whole of that magnificent chronicle Mahavamsa, from which I have so often quoted, - a phrase embodying an ideal hopeless of attainment by a foreign ruler.

It was the art of a poor people, the annual income of whose kings did not in the eighteenth century exceeded £2000 in money, beside revenue in kind. It was very different from the sumptuary art of the great courts and wealthy cities of India, of which we trace but a faint reflection here and there in the use of Indian materials, and the importation of Indian craftsmen. But it is the only true art discoverable in Ceylon to-day. In a few years it may be gone forever. I have tried to make a picture of it, before it was too late.

…

This book is not primarily intended as a work of scholarship, but is written first of all for the Sinhalese people, as a memorial of a period which at present they are not willing to understand. The ‘educated’ Sinhalese of to-day, after, on the one hand, a century of foreign government, and of education in which the national culture has been completely ignored, and, on the other hand, an equal period of subservient and obsequious imitation of foreign manners, have little reason to be proud of their present achievement in the Art of Living. Evidence of shallow thought is everywhere to be seen in an exaltation of the present age at the expense of the past. It is, however, only in an effort to realise the ideals of this very past, and of the past of India, that there lies the possibility of a true regeneration and revitalising of the national life of the Sinhalese people.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Medieaval Sinhalese Art, 1908

I was born a villager, spent my early childhood in a village, and live a villager at heart. Folk art is deeply rooted in our family. It is these roots, and my immense respect to the traditional art and culture of our people that I wanted to reflect in the design of this site.

The Liquid Layout

I heart liquid layouts, but the commercial websites don’t really offer a lot of opportunities to experiment with them. Apart from the very first design that didn’t last more than a few weeks, Nidahas has always had a liquid layout, which is retained in this version as well. The home page has two liquid columns with a fixed-width center column, and the internal pages have a liquid content area. The site has a min-width of 600px and a max-width of 1100px.

The home page uses some ugly CSS to achieve it’s layout with the source order I wanted to use: the two liquid columns first, with the narrow, fixed-width center column after them. A look under the hood will reveal what I mean.

Browser Support

At the time of making this live, I had tested the theme on Firefox and IE6 only - working as intended in FF and minor issues in IE, which I’m working on fixing. Hopefully Safari and Opera are doing fine. Older versions of IE are sure to choke over it, but that’s something I’m not going to be bothered about. Arrogance is a luxury I don’t get to enjoy at work, so might as well make the most of it at play.

However, please let me know if there’s anything broken when viewed in a modern browser. A broken design in Safari is almost as uncool as having a perfect one in IE.

Permanent Link | Filed under: Design, Web, Thoughts

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