Thursday, 21 September 2006, 07:43:32 EDT
One of the most read posts on my site is #167. In it, I talk about my reasoning for rewriting this site as HTML 4.01 instead of XHTML 1.0 (as it was before). The article I linked to is quite technical, and a little difficult to understand if you are new to HTML et alii. It seems this topic comes up quite a bit on Apple's webkit mailing list. As a result, they wrote a ... (view rest)
Sunday, 08 August 2004, 21:43:14 EDT
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I have converted this web site back to HTML 4.01 Strict. I have been meaning to do it for a long time now but decided to quit putting it off. Why HTML 4.01 and not XHTML 1.0? That is a good question and one that will take a bit of explaining. The first thing you should do is read http://xrl.us/ba4c from start to finish.
Done? Good. Now let me explain what it said.
HTML is marked up text, hence, Hypertext Makrup Language. That means a web page is, or should be, nothing but text marked up so that user agents, i.e. your web browser, can interpret what the text means. A good example is the <h1> and the <p> elements. The first element denotes a heading level one; this is typically rendered as very large bold text by most web browsers. The second element indicates that the text is a paragraph, just like a paragraph in a book. The idea here is that a user agent can pick up certain elements and do magical things with them. Theoretically a user agent could pick out the heading elements, of which there are six, and create a table of contents for the web page. The user agent could then present you with the table of contents and allow you to navigate through the document like a book. Basically, a web page is nothing but plain text with elements describing the text. That is the most basic idea about HTML and if you can grasp that you will better understand why there are standards for web technologies (HTML, CSS, XHTML, et al).
XHTML is completely different. To understand what Extensible Hypertext Markup Language is and why it exists you need to understand what XML is and what its purpose is. XML is a textual representation of data. Let me repeat that, it is a textual representation of data. XML can be used to store settings for applications to describing the visual structure of applications. For example, in a couple of the projects I am idly working on I use XML to store user settings and such; I also use XML to describe the user interface — where the buttons should go and such. XML is very portable and quite human readable. An XML file written on one platform can very easily be used on another platform. The programs just have to be written to read it. This feature lends itself very well to the internet; at least in theory. Writing web pages in pure XML, like this one, would not be very efficient. However, writing normal web pages that can make use of XML is. Imagine for a minute if you could write a web page that works just like a normal web page yet has portions that are much more advanced than just text and images. Wouldn't you like that? Well, that is what XHTML is for. XHTML allows you to write an average run of the mill web page yet take ... (view rest)
Thursday, 25 September 2003, 00:53:00 EDT
If you are viewing this site in Internet Explorer you have probably noticed that these news items are not centered and are not as wide as one would think they should be. It seems that Internet Explorer's !Doctype support does not like the XHTML !DOCTYPE definition. Don't know what I mean by !DOCTYPE? Read here.
Basically, I am not going to go out of my way to make IE work like it should. I know of a way to get the site to look proper with IE but then I have to maintain two stylesheets. If you want to view this site as it should be get a more standards compliant browser like Mozil ... (view rest)
Sunday, 21 September 2003, 21:18:08 EDT
I decided to go ahead and make the transition to XHTML 1.0 on all of my sites. I decided that I would start with this one first as a test ... (view rest)