WEB Stuff

Web Stuff
These pages talk about the World Wide Web (WWW), webpage programming, and my opinions on some WWW issues.

The De-volving Web
A diatribe on the state of the WWW. I believe the Web to be a great gift which is not being used as intended.

What will be here
Real soon now, I'll have some pages up concerning :
XML for webpages
Maintaining your webpages

What I use
Most of my Client-side webpages (pages which rely only on browsers for display) are created with Slackware GNU/Linux text editors and utilities ; vi, emacs, awk, make, etc. GNU/Linux is to be preferred by far over Windows ; it (and UNIX in general) has many text manipulation utilities which allow webpage generation and updating to be automated to a high degree. GNU/Linux is also free software developed and supported by the GNU Project and by Linus Torvalds and his dedicated supporters. I do have various versions of Windows running for testing browsers and character encoding compatibility (okay, and for playing games). Server-side dynamic webpages are created with CGI programs written in Perl or GNU c/c++, though I find myself using Python more and more.

When I fire up a browser for surfing, it is usually Firefox or Opera. There are no 3rd party plug-ins installed on any of my browsers. Similarly, Java, Javascript, ActiveX, and cookies are disabled.

The home network consists of three computers: my sister's H-P Pavillion running Windows XP, my Gateway GT4016 running XP Pro and Linux, and a heavily modified e-machines T1090 running Slackware which acts as a server and firewall.
The Internet connection is via AT&T Broadband Internet cable service.

Webpage Programming
I am an advocate of STANDARD HTML webpage programming. Through experience, I have learned that incorporating many different webpage construction methods into one document results only in webpages that display/operate inconsistently and are hard to maintain across development tool revisions and standard changes. (Basically, backwards compatibility is lacking in the fast moving world of web development.)

There is a set of newer standards which may actually help information sharing on the Web; XML. XML was originally envisioned as a way to markup data in the same way that HTML is used to markup displayable webpage information. XML has grown into more of a concept than just purely a data markup language. XHTML, for instance, is just HTML that complies with the XML markup syntax. The XML movement has great potential to enhance information sharing and promote standardized Web programming.

XML, CSS, and HTML
One thing is for sure ; these webpages do not look the same in all browsers. The reasons for this are many, among them ; rapidly changing standards, older browsers, laziness on my part.

Depending upon the browser and browser version (and enabled browser options, ie, stylesheet support), there's no telling what these pages look like to you.

I've made some example webpages that may illustrate the problems.

WEB Stuff, No CSS
This is the WEB Stuff page with CSS disabled. It should display black text on a white or gray background with no layout (each paragraph element will just display down the page). This is how CSS non-compliant browsers (or browsers with stylesheet support disabled) would render this page. If it looks the same as this page, your browser has no support for CSS.

The e-machines T1090
I have both GNU/Linux and some version of Windows on all my computers, except the T1090. The RESTORE CD's which come with the T1090 do not have an "install" option; they simply write a disk image file onto the entire 20GB hard drive which destroys any partitioning the user may have performed. Since I don't have a re-partition program which can re-size the NTFS file system used by WindowsXP, I had to remove XP from the T1090 in order to get Linux in it's own disk partitions. If you are considering using an e-machine for dual-os operation, remember that you cannot "re-install" the XP operating system from the RESTORE CD's without overwriting the entire hard drive. There are commercial apps which can re-size the NTFS partition, an extra hard drive can be added to hold the other OS, or you can buy a copy of WindowsXP and install it from the original package. In any case, e-machines' RESTORE method (undoubtedly imposed by Microsoft OEM licensing requirements) makes dual OS operation a little more difficult and/or expensive. If you can live without XP, it just makes the e-machines a little more expensive (you're paying for XP whether you use it or not). Still, I could not build as capable a machine as the T1090 from scratch for what they cost when I got mine. Just a caveat.