From the “Yeah, we’ve heard this one before…” Dept

Hi all,

I’ve been promising a new site for about a month and a half now, and I’m happy to say that if things go well, it will be rolled out sometime next week.

Granted, the site won’t look too different, but for me, v2 is really a proof of concept for some up-and-coming web technologies that I believe will gain a large foothold in about a year.

They include:

• XHTML 1.0: To put is simply, this is the next version of HTML. It’s been rewritten to conform with well-formed XML rules and standards. Super strict, almost masochistic in how strict it is.
• CSS 1.0 and 2.0: Cascading Stylesheets are used for text formatting and object layout.
• Content Management System: THis is a server based app that I will use to drive all my content. Saves a lot of time if you are willing to put the effort into setting it up.

I’ve decided to follow the rules by the book; that means that I am writing the site using “strict” guidelines. I will only use tables to show tabular data, I will not use tables to layout text and images, rather I will use CSS for that. Secondly, my site is should validate under the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD. One cool outcome of this is that I’ll be able to syndicate my site across different viewing platforms (you should be able to read my site on a cell phone or PDA, etc.) and it will have built-in accessibility features (for the sight-impaired, you can use a screen reader). Moreover, since the site will in XHTML, I can transform it like I would with XML. For the hardcore unix folks, since there are no tables, my site will read perfectly using a text HTML browser such as lynx.

When v2 of Pixels and Widgets is done, I’ll start exploring how to modularize my page (pretty simple actually) using perl5 and php4 for v2.1. Thus, I’ll have super flexibility to layout my page. Moving further, I’ll explore using a database to contain my data, and possibly examine other data repositories (XML most likely).

Pretty cool, eh?

From the “This is what needs to be done” Dept.

I still have a ways to go before I release V2.0

• Create header / branding graphics
• Choose a colour scheme
• Apply this template to all of my site
• Get my formmail perl script up and running
• tweak the style sheet layout

From the “Information Architecture” Department

One thing about my site that I haven’t done is figure out a good naming convention for my images. I’m still working on that. It’s proved problematic. I will talk about this in a later blog.

Cheers,

Tai