All Downhill From Here?

I'm getting close to having a presentable finished product. Today I wrote up a draft of my site's commentary in FAQ format, and did some graphical work on my top nav menu. The nav links had been bare words, and I thought that the sea-and-sky theme merited something a little more interesting. I booted up GIMP, drew a white cloud on a transparent background, and (with the help of a YouTube tutorial) made it into an animated GIF. When you hover your mouse over the cloud, it turns gray, then starts dropping rain and lightning. Then I inserted my links into the clouds. Web designers are always playing with fire when they include animated GIFs in their designs, but I liked the feel of these. They only move when you touch them, so they aren't needlessly distracting to the user; they just heighten the feeling of interactivity and reinforce the playful tone of the site.

Here's the thing. I got the mouse-over effect working by using a built-in Dreamweaver feature. But when I run the automatically generated code through an XHTML validator, it spews venomous hatred at me! Thus alerted, I tried the page in a few different browsers. The clouds work great in Chrome, but the transparency fails in Internet Explorer, and the mouse-over image doesn't load at all in Firefox. How frustrating! If I have time, I will see if I can fix this. Still to do, in rough order by priority: write an About Me page; clean up the footer; finalize the FAQs; play with the blog's CSS; fix the clouds; add a little more art, preferably box-breaking; get a Creative Commons license for the Verses page.