Over the years I've written tens of thousands of pages of HTML code for my various web sites. Some of these were created over twenty years ago on an old word processor called WORD-11, some on Microsoft Word, others in Frontpage and quite a few in online web page creation applets. One day I was looking through these sites and decided it was time to update the code to a standard so it would be easier to maintain and have a more professional and consistant look.
I decided to use ASP as the base because it allows INCLUDE statements and is very simple and straightforward. ASP is very mature and, since much of my experience is with Windows based systems, it was easy for me to learn. Through the use of INCLUDE statements, I concluded i would be able to create a few central files to control the way the sites looked and operated.
The next decision was obvious; to code using the CSS 2.0 standard. This fit perfectly with using ASP pages to control the structure of my web sites, in that I could create a consistant format and be able to change that format with minimal effort. One change in one file would be reflected throughout all of my web sites instantly.
The final decision was more difficult. Should I use HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0? After some thought I decided to use XHTML 1.0. This is the most advanced specification, although it is also the most difficult to use. I also decided to use XHTML strict in most of my webpages; this comes from my practice, back when I was a programmer, to explicitly declare all variables and so forth. It's just better practice and ensures that the webpages a more likely to work in all browsers; at least all modern browsers.
As my journey in this effort progressed I learned quite a bit about what to do and what not to do in ASP, XHTML, and CSS. One of the most frustrating discoveries was that the CSS and XHTML standards are actually not entirely standard between all browsers. Yes, he has got much better than it was years ago during the browser wars between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, but sometimes the differences between the browsers was frustrating, interesting, and often downright stupid.
And occasionally, the choices that the XHTML designers made were even more frustrating than the differences between the browsers. For example, CSS 2.0 lacks any clear way to center a non-textual element such as an image. Oh, you can do it, and it's not that hard, but it's certainly not obvious.
Purpose of this website is to document some of the quirks that I learned on this journey. Hopefully, this can help others write better XHTML and CSS webpages.
As you can probably tell, I'm a big fan of hand coding webpages. I don't hand coding everything. For example, my Renaissance faire website consists of over 400,000 webpages, mostly containing images and videos. Those pages about hand coded by any means; in fact I use a product called Microsoft FrontPage decode those pages (the pages themselves are created via a script).
But these days I hand code most of my other pages for the simple reason that it gives me perfect control over everything that's displayed or performed by my webpages. This allows me to create websites that say and do exactly what I wanted them to say and do. In other words, by hand coding my webpages, I am able to communicate exactly what I want to communicate. I am able to control my message perfectly.
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Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.