Welcome!

This is Tierra Verde, my fourth submission to OSWD. This design was inspired by the website of

whereis.com.au, an Australian-based online street directory. I chose the name Tierra Verde to encapsulate the green earthy tones which dominate the design’s color scheme.

Features of This Design

Standards compliant: Tierra Verde is 100% compliant with HyperText? Markup Language">XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2 for more consistent browser rendering. The design is also XHTML 1.1-ready, merely requiring an XML declaration and a change of DTD.
Layout without tables: Unlike this design’s inspiration, Tierra Verde does not use tables for layout purposes. This stems from my personal conviction that tables should only be used to display tabular data.

More Features of This Design

Relative metrics: Most measurements (such as widths and spacings) are font-size relative. This means that if a viewer changes the page’s default font size, the document metrics also change to compensate.
Separate stylesheet for color scheme: All the colors of this design are defined in their own stylesheet. Thus, you can generate several versions of this stylesheet which define different color schemes for your webpage. To change your page’s colors, simply replace the color scheme stylesheet with a different version.

Final Notes

I guess the movitation for making this design was to demonstrate that a good-looking website written in HTML 4.0 Transitional and making extensive use of tables could be rewritten in XHTML 1.0 Strict without tables, and not lose too much design-wise.

I hope you find Tierra Verde useful. If you use this design or derive inspiration from it, please let me know so that I may see your site and share in your design ideas. That is, after all, the basic philosophy of OSWD!

-- MauricioVieira - 24 Jun 2004