About blogger.com's templates

In you can pick a template you like, and publish your blogs using this templates.

When I picked a new template yesterday, I noticed that there're 3 problems in most of the templates:

1, I think everyone can see that most of the templates have a fixed width to fit 800 x 600 screen. I can't say all, but all the templates I tested are. Those designers are too lazy to test their products under other resolutions, for example, 1280*1024 as my screen, so we can see those blogs only use 70% of the screen, like CNN. In my template I have to adjust width of #main from 485px to 70%, and #sidebar from 235 to 28%.

2, To make it portable, all the stylesheet information (css info) are on the top of the template, so make it on the top of every blog file. Currently my template has a 7,518 bytes css header, that means in my 100 blogs it took 700k bytes of the space. Actually we can replace the css header with ＜style type="text/css" src="template.css"/> and puth that 7,518 bytes into the file template.css, then we can save 693k bytes in the host and the network traffic.

3, All the templates I used have a header like:

＜head>
＜title>＜$BlogPageTitle$>＜/title>
＜$BlogMetaData$>

This is wrong. In any html file we should always put

＜meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

before the title, because when the browser render title without knowing the encoding information, the browser will make a wild guess, and usually it's wrong. These templates work fine for English blogs, but not all the blogs are in English. So we have to change the template as:

＜head>
＜$BlogMetaData$>
＜title>＜$BlogPageTitle$>＜/title>