PW.net and HTML Standards
Well, The biggest thing to talk about right now is what i’m doing to PsychoticWolf.net at this point. I decided with this website i’d actually attempt to care about web standards, since I’ve accused Microsoft Internet Explorer, repeatedly of not being properly supporting, when it may be that i’m just bad at writing HTML that actually respects the standards in some ways. PsychoticWolf.net is being written in HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS2. This, while for those who know about the standards, know it’s late to be finally adopting HTML4/CSS, is a major thing for me, as i’m actaully verifying the pages for validity.
When I began designing websites, I was much younger, and HTML 3.2 was still the active standard, as much, the editor I use, and still use, is only a HTML 3.2 editor. I like the editor because it is basically like Notepad+Wizards and helpful toolbars for HTML. I’ve used it to write alot of my PHP scripts as well. It’s even handy for fixing up Apache Configurations, and other Unix/Linux documents as it understands the line-endings, when notepad doesn’t. The editor was last updated in 1998. Since that time, HTML 4 and CSS came about. While I’ve taken the time to learn some CSS and write it correctly. I adopted a bad method for HTML.. I took the HTML 3.2, I knew, and began adding 4 tags to it, as I’d copy/paste and learn new. Never actually fixing the DOCTYPE or even learning the correct doctype syntax for 4. While I still do significant testing, among different browsers for viewability, it’s not the correct method. Some I believe have named this practice “tag soup” as it’s formed and thrown at the browser to deal with.
I now intend to upgrade all my pages to at least HTML 4.01 Transitional, and stay within spec or at least, try to, but for this site, I decided to test in Strict also, to see what the differences are. The experience has so far, been educational, to say the least. I’ve learned much of the changes that occured between HTML 3.2 and HTML4 in a matter of a few years, including stuff such as the dropping of the FONT tag, and some of the way CSS actually does a layout. I’m still not quite finished converting the site over, (as of this writing the photos and links pages are still not valid.) Home, About Me, Weblog, and WolfLan are valid though as they stand now. Though, I find that this is more complex than I figured it would be. I didn’t realize how off I was from the Strict 4 standard in some cases.
The other reason I’ve decided to actually work on writing in Standard HTML, is because of the amount of time I’ve started spending around the Mozilla.org IRC channel and working with Mozilla Suite/Mozilla Firebird as a whole. For those who are aware of the existance of XHTML, and wonder why I’m spending time learning correct HTML4 and not XHTML 1.. Read this article, http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml.
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll finish the last two sections and getting them verifying, and fix a few site bugs which have popped up even though the code is valid. Due to differences in the way the browser shows the code, and be then able to finish the initial design/creation of my new homepage. I’ve got a lot more stuff that’s personal and much less technical to do, still to come. 🙂
