Page last Modified: May 06, 2005 - 1:03PM MT - Visits
VintageWatercooleds.com Technotes :: About the Standards

What Happened?

The home page of the site dropped from more than 100k with MS FrontPage's dirty HTML to 34KB with XHTML and CSS. Conforming to the standards makes sure that the site looks fine in all browsers. This is especially important for me, because this site gets many visits from around the world.

What is XHTML?

What is XHTML 1.1 Strict? Well - this is the future of the web. It's a combination of HTML and XML. The actual language on the page is just content - while styling goes in the CSS. This webpage can be viewed on any browser - even a cell phone. The text can be resized by the browser, and the images have alt tags - in case the images can't be found, or the browser can't display the images. One major change is that I only use tables for what they are meant for now - tabular data. Not page layout. The layout is handled by CSS.

What is CSS?

CSS Stands for Cascading Style Sheets. They hold all of the font styles, spacing, layout and structure information of the pages. When you load a page here - the CSS only has to be downloaded once - then it is used to layout all subsequent pages that you look at. In the old format, your browser had to load all the images and the tables that made up the top table bar up there. Now it just slaps it on and focuses on the page content.

About the Scripts on these pages...

There are abbr tags on this page. To use them - hover your mouse over one of the words. XML XHTML HTML and CSS all have them too. In Firefox, they are underlined red - but that does not work in IE. It works in IE because of a script I got from Jackson Davis.

There is a text counter script - the counter is from PHP Junkyard. I also use PHP Click counter to track the clicks on the links of this site - also from PHP Junkyard.

The mouseover images at the top are handled by a script from QuirksMode.org.

Unfortunate Side Effects

Yeah there's a catch. Or two... the 'Strict' part means I can't use frames. That's fine - but it has the side effect of making anything with 'target' not working, meaning I can't make links open in new windows anymore. I don't like that at all - especially for pictures. I'm thinking about doing a javascript popup for the photos, but the links to other sites will stay this way. So If you click on a link to leave - open it in a new window. Sorry about that. I could go XHTML 1.1 or 1.0 transitional - but I don't think that this is annoying enough to justify it.

[Back to Top] [Index] [VWC Forums] [Contact/Donate]