Web Update Project!

Well, after trying to decide what to do today, I decided that (to be low-key and not too involved) I would take on the conversion from HTML (anywhere between 3.2 and 4.01) to XHTML (1.0). Essentially it’s a change to ensure everything’s in lowercase and also that all necessary attributes are in place and properly nested.

I was having a problem during the redesign of the MZ Online root website where some browsers (namely the slightly older ones) were displaying content differently than others. While I nail most of it to the fact that they didn’t support 4.01 and CSS2, I did find some things which also might have caused the problem…although was ‘transparent’ to the browsers which understand how to deal with problems.

Anyway, at this point in time the root MZ Online website has been completely validated as VALID XHTML 1.0 and VALID CSS 2. It’s about the best I can do when it comes to ensuring that each visitor sees exactly what the others see (and what/how I’d like them to see).

Fortunately, TWiki does valid XHTML in its parsing and interpretation, so I don’t have to worry about that at all. The main parts I need to deal with are in the places where I’ve written my own HTML (e.g. view templates and some page content blocks). So, the next level of the project is to take on this site (Matt’s Home on the Web) and then probably the Python site (although I’m sure that won’t happen this weekend). Mine should be fairly straightforward once the templates are fixed, so I would imagine I’d get that done today. The Python site, on the other hand, is another beast and is going to take an entire weekend just to go through (due to the size of it). That, and if I start working on the Python site, I’ll have to add some stuff…so…

What a way to spend a gloomy weekend (it’s raining and just un-sunny out today)!

But in moving on, I’ll wrap it up at that and write more as more comes up.

Update (8PM Central Time)!

Well, as of right now (about seven hours later), Matt’s Home on the Web has been converted to VALID XHTML 1.0 and VALID CSS 2! Well, with the small exception of some of the news archive, anyway. The news archive was a beast of over 125 pages in total to be edited, most of them for things that would bring the page out of compliance by one item…and so the time involved versus usefulness ratio was too low for me. I did fix and validate the main news pages, though, and future templates so that all additional news will be in compliance. It was also a prime opportunity to do some site tweaking, namely in the MattResume section which was badly formatted before and in need of serious repair. In fact, I spent the last hour and a half on that document itself…pretty much a complete rewrite.

But, it’s good to know that it’s done now. Sometime…will come the Python site and others I host here. But before that comes along, I want to do some ‘edit/preview’ template tweaks for all the sites (MZ Online has a very good edit/preview set, but the rest are kinda odd). Of course, you as the general public don’t get to see these pages…which is why they’ve been put off.

Anyway, until next time…

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/25/07