Free at last

Thank god almighty, I am free from HTML at last.

• The pages all validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict, in theory. In practice some of my older comments break. Hopefully I’ll be able to avoid this in the future.

• I’m a bit dubious about whether the JavaScript that remembers user information is working. I personally don’t care about it, so if others confirm that it doesn’t work (and don’t want to fix it *grin*) I’ll probably just remove it.

• I tested in Mozilla 1.1 and IE 5.5 (5.50.4807.2300), and had a third party (thanks ardent and Andy) test in IE 6. Supposedly it’s readable. IE 5.5 is missing some CSS stuff that makes it not display a few things exactly right, but I’m unconcerned; go get a real browser.

• There are inconsistencies in my XHTML and CSS2, probably. There’s also some reuse of styles and perhaps style sheets where there should be none. I would even wager that I should have named the files a bit differently. Tough. Feel free to fix it and send it to me.

• There’s no TrackBack anything in any of these pages. If someone actually wants to use it, please get in touch with me and I’ll consider adding it.

• If you spot things in previous entries that look formatted wrong or break in your browser, please inform me of the exact URL that is breaking and I’ll try and look in to it. (Hell, if you find spelling errors or what-not, please feel free to inform me of it.

I actually just realized I have a few things to do: RSS syndication links, some more archive links from the main page, and the “Made with Movable Type” logos or whatever. I think the license requires those last, but I don’t mind adding them since this actually seems like a pretty nice piece of software. I also need to move this from /blogs to /weblogs. Oh, I also need to dork with the navigation bars in the various archive sections, because they’re looking uglier the more I look at them. Oops, I need to fix time zones in the timestamps too. After I get these things done I hope to just use this stuff for quite some time. Note that when I started writing this paragraph it was much shorter; it keeps growing as I remember something and add it here. Blah.

Notes on IE 5.5. Stick <?xml-stylesheet?> processing instructions in your XHTML and (at least the newest) IE 5.5 and IE 6 die. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s something to do with the most recent updates to both of these browsers. IE 5.5 doesn’t do content generation from CSS. There’s a bunch of stuff about how IE’s box model has a problem that causes all sorts of calculation errors, along with some “cute” (*cough*) hack to get around it of sorts; I didn’t run into this problem.

Sites I found highly useful while doing this web log:

• Movable Type User Manual of course.

• Web colors, though I don’t even know if this matters these days.

• W3C Validator.

• For that matter, a whole bunch of specs at W3C’s site.

• Index DOT Html, which was the easiest place I could find to get the “normal” (default) CSS display attribute value for most HTML elements. Also had a list of HTML block-level elements.

I thought about making my Wiki-like plugin for MT do some modification of the document WRT inserting tags to ensure XHTML validity of a post (though I couldn’t really ensure it, I suppose, without a bunch more logic; more like simple steps to add the functionality). I was then distracted by a cat toy or something I’m sure. I also need to fix my PSGML patch to not insert every damn #FIXED attribute when using C-c C-a.