Standards Compliance

• CSS

  This site uses CSS styles for layout and presentation. This means that the display of the information is divorced from the structure of the information. This is a good thing (see below).

  I had a little trouble getting the CSS boxes to appear appropriately on the <pre> tags on my site. The width of the box would either be fixed or a percent of the window, not based on the width of the text. I found that by setting my <pre> tags to a style of float: left; the width of the CSS box behaved as I wanted.

• XHTML

  This site uses XHTML for document structure. This means that the structure of the document and its information is divorced from the display. This is a good thing (see below).

• Text-only Browser

  This site was developed using a text-only browser. Contrary to popular belief, not all browsers are graphical. This website is designed to convey information above all else. As an afterthought, hopefully it will "look good" to you.

• No Javascript or Flash

  To ensure that this website works properly in the most number of browsers, this site does not use any client-side scripting (i.e. Javascript) or plugin-based embedded objects (i.e. Flash). This means that the greatest number of people will be able to view this site without trouble. And everyone will be able to see the information in a clear, concise, practical manner.

• Content-Type Negotiation and Permanent URIs

  This site attempts to avoid specifying technology types wherever possible. It should not matter that the pages presented were generated by PHP. This becomes especially important when dealing with permanent URIs. The concept of permanent URIs is that the location of the resource should not change as time passes. A location is picked intelligently, and that location should last for 100 years. Obviously, technology will change over those 100 years, and PHP will probably no longer be the language of choice for website generation. Should the URI change simply because the technology changed? Of course not!

  Content-Type negotiation fits hand-in-hand. If an image like benlove is requested, how does the requestor or the server know which file to actually send? The requestor can submit preferences (first, GIF; then, PNG) and the web server can send the most appropriate file (benlove.gif, benlove.png, or benlove.jpg) based on which types are preferred and which types are available. This is an example of Content-Type negotiation.

• Non-compliance

  After reading about the benefits of good compliance practices, one might wonder why non-compliant documents exist. In fact, it turns out that there are probably more non-compliant documents than compliant ones. This example of bad HTML source might shed some light upon this matter, especially if one were to notice what document editor was used to create the document.