Journal: News & Comment

Invisible success

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I know this page doesn't look any different, but with a little bit of effort (and some reprogramming of keystrokes in my brain) I finally managed to make the code that generates it validate completely as XHTML (XHTML 1.0 Transitional, to be exact). Geeky, yes, but there are some good reasons for doing it. This page:

• is now as likely as it may ever be to look the same in modern Web browsers, regardless of computer platform or browser maker, yet still work in older ones.
• can display acceptably on text-only, handheld, and other limited browsers.
• is at least minimally accessible to people with various types of disabilities.
• doesn't require your Web browser to do any guessing about what I meant it to do when rendering what you see.
• will be easier to port to any future Internet or Web display standards, which, like XHTML, are likely to be based on XML.
• is easier for other Web developers to interpret if they want to look at my code.

But really, I like it mostly because it's geeky.

(Extra geek points: the style sheet validates too.)

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