CSS/XHTML Design

This is a serialization of how I have approached XHTML design.

Prologue

CSS and XHTML aren't new technologies. They have been around in one form or the other for more than five years now. And slowly but surely, standards compliance that is the major objective of embracing CSS and XHTML as opposed to archaic <font> tags, is gaining greater importance. CSS and XHTML are W3C standards. And Microsoft has the largest browser share in the market. What I'll make clear from the very beginning on is that designing HTML that is compliant, and which works in Internet Explorer is easy. For people who have not gone the way of table-layouts and font tags, it is easier. If your page validates, and your understanding of the CSS/XHTML involved is accurate, it is the fault of the browser maker when it doesn't render. Of course, when the errant browser maker is Microsoft, you'll often tweak your pages so that it does validate, and it is nice to IE. The power of being the market leader is awesome, and as a result, hacks that people have been employing since time immemorial are still relevant and will still be used if you want your pages to look the same everywhere.

Why use CSS/XHTML over HTML 4 with inline formatting? For pages that are poorly designed, page bloat will be reduced in excess of 80%. That alone should be reason enough. And for purists like me, the code is cleaner and clearer. And of course the holy grail of all web developers - that of separating content, presentation and layout.

Vishnu Gopal

Facts

Age, 18. Birthday, 25th September 1984. Location, India. Sex, Male.

I love books, I love to read, I love computers and I love to write. I'm not exactly new on the scene - I had my first computer when I was seven and I developed a network-enabled useless-BBS-clone when I was 15. And then I learnt C. And PHP, and Javascript. And recently XHTML certification, MySQL integration and the lovely language that is Python.

I'm studying to become a computer engineer in SCT College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram. For more about me, you'll have to turn to the main page and read. To know about a person in bits and pieces is another thing that blogging is about.

Ramblings, Avatar Six

And Why It's Transient

I've been keeping a blog off and on for three years now - mostly off, and a lot of my ramblings are now on my hard-disk in a format that I would find hard to convert to simple HTML. And I've been having this writing itch lately. And Google has acquired Pyra Labs.

Blogging on a google server will certainly not hurt your search results, even though Vishnu Gopal is good enough for me :-) And so, UR Avatar Six. I've changed the cjb.net domain to point to the new location at Blogger, [this one] and I've written some fancy javascript (A tutorial will follow later) to use nice well-formed permalinks, and I've managed to find a way to link between posts, though it is going to be difficult to establish such links initially.

Avatar Six is again a step backward. The last avatar had a PHP based template-oriented XML-enabled (nice nice juicy technology that had no proper hosts) system that I termed Koal. I will not switch back to that for some time now. Because of Google, of course.