Standards compliance

This site is a proud member of the Viewable With Any Browser campaign.

I have made a concerted effort to keep the HTML on this site standard, clean, and portable. These pages use no Netscape- or Internet Explorer-specific tags, and the few bits of JavaScript are ECMA-compliant.

This site uses JavaScript only to generate the last-modified dates at the upper-right-hand of each new-style page. You can disable JavaScript without missing much, therefore.

The HTML has been designed to degrade gracefully in a non-CSS-aware browser. The contents of the left menu bars should appear before main text.

Almost all the HTML is XHTML (4.0.1 transitional) that has been validated.

If you see broken images, get a browser that can view PNGs. This is a GIF-free site. The GIF patents are expired everywhere now, but PNG has better quality per compressed byte and I feel cleaner when I use it..

This site uses no Flash, Shockwave, or other such proprietary garbage.

Reporting problems

There are two kind of bugs that can cause this website to render badly in your browser. One is problems in my HTML/CSS/JavaScript; the other is bugs in your browser, including failures to comply with W3C standards.

I am quite willing to repair broken code on my site. But my willingness to `fix' the site to accommodate every crappy browser ever written is limited. Consider this incentive to get a browser that actually works. On the other hand, if you point out where I'm not standards-conformant it will generally be fixed quickly.

In practice, this means that you may trip over some of the semi-infinite number of bugs in Internet Explorer or Opera, especially older versions like IE 3. I test with the Linux versions of Mozilla and Konqueror, and occasionally with the Mac port of Netscape 4.x.

If you trip over an apparent bug, try to find out if it replicates under a browser that isn't broken. Then try making a copy of the page and removing stuff until it renders. I'd do this myself, but I don't have a Windows box to test with. And don't want to.

Reports of broken links are always welcome.

Design philosophy

This site is designed to convey information, not show off browser tricks or impress anyone with my graphic artistry. You'll encounter three styles of page here:

High-style pages like this one and my home page. These use CSS, and tend to be either link collections or lightweight text.
Longer essays generated from DocBook-XML masters. You can spot these by the revision histories and contents pages up front.
Old-style HTML. Spot these by the canned header and footer with links to my home page and the sitemap in it. Sometimes I'll convert these to high style if you prod me. Sometimes I won't; some pages look better in running Times-Roman style without a title or nav bar.

For extended discussion of the principles behind this site design, see The HTML Hell Page.