The new look was broken (in different ways) in at least two different browsers, and was messing up other stuff, so I've gone back to the old look for now. I'll test the new approach more thoroughly and fix the problems before I put it back in place.
FWIW, I prefer seeing everything about an entry on a single line (as in the old look) as opposed to having the datestamp below the entry (as the new look appeared for me).
I wanted to get rid of the table look—I’m dissatisfied with the way the horizontal spacing looks (especially with the latest-comments sidebar)—but I couldn’t figure out a good way to show the entry title, the number of comments, and the date all on one line without the info being in two columns. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the two-lines-per-item look either, though. Further research is indicated. Suggestions welcome.
(If anyone who missed it wants to see what the tentative new way looked like, it’s on a separate page for now.)
What if you put the date to the left of the entry title? Then you don’t need to go with a tabular layout to get each entry entirely on one line, but the entry titles will still all line up (provided you continue to use a monospace font for the datestamp, and can set it up to insert a space when the hour is less than 10).
OK, you might want to also add a space for dates less than 10, but I think that’s less important; but I certainly don’t think you’d need to bother with month-name-widths.
I’ll let you know if I think of anything. I had to do something like this at work, so I may have some adaptable CSS I can slurp out.
And if you have a test page later on, let me know if you’d like me to unleash the (W|L)intel Web Browser Test Machine of Doom on it. One laptop. 18 major browser versions. It stress-tests CSS sites pretty effectively with only one reboot.
I’ve got the Mac OS Web Browser Test Machine of Slight Cause for Concern as well, but you’re probably better equipped to test stuff on that front. And a lot of the problematic browser implementations will be caught by the True Dread Beast, above.
I’ve been pretty heavily immersed in CSS for the past few months, so I shouldn’t have much trouble making this work when I have a little time to play with it. But that might not happen for a couple more weeks, so I didn’t want to subject people to the bad formatting in some browsers in the mean time.
Will: I tried putting the date to the left of the title, but I want to include both date and time, and that started to feel long—the title was kind of buried in the middle of a line of text. Also, I’m not currently using a monospace font for the timestamp; I could switch to one, but I don’t think I’d like how that looks. But maybe I’ll give it a try and see.
Thanks for browser-test offer, Stephen! I may well take you up on that. I’ve got, oh, six or ten Mac browsers (several versions of each), but only three or four Windows browsers.