Not being a web developer, I don’t often take the time to play with my web site. Today, however, I had occasion to tinker with CSS for a project at work. While I already knew about the benefits of CSS, I hadn’t taken the time to actually do anything about it yet.
Now, my web site has been mashed and mangled together over the better part of a decade. What this means is that it’s seen various tagging styles come and go and a vast number of variations in browsers come and go. Even my taste in formatting has changed over the years. In fact, the wayback machine may provide you with some idea of what my site used to look like. (Search it for www.l-w.net.)
As many of you can no doubt imagine, the code is in quite a state of inconsistency between various pages and so on. It is in various states of compliance with various standards for HTML.
At some point, I converted everything to very basic layout and removed most of the inline formatting tags. This is as far as I got in revamping the code to be coherent. Until now.
I am now in the process of redoing all the static pages on my site so they validate as strict html 4.01. I am also tossing in a style sheet so I can change the basic look with a lot less hassle. Of course, I will no doubt discover a wonderful new thing that will require a complete redo again, but so be it. At least I can change the colours of things without editing every page now.
Eventually, I’ll also convert the blog into the new format. Right along with the ability to post comments and all that jazz. But then, I did use to be writing a mud, too.