Web Notes
Technologies
These pages are managed and served using a variety of open technologies.
Content is managed using PHP. Using PHP greatly simplifies content management and ensures consistency, as recurring parts of the page structure are constructed programmatically.
The target language for content is XHTML 1.1, with CSS 2.1 used to specify presentation. The use of XHTML+CSS has several advantages:
It enables these pages to appear identically in any standards-compliant browser, such as Mozilla, Firefox, OmniWeb or Safari, although only the WebKit based browsers (Safari and OmniWeb) do the cool rendering of the CSS drop shadows in the title and headers.
It enables adjusting the presentation for different environments, e.g., these pages print differently than they display on the screen.
I've checked to ensure that the display is acceptable under IE5.x/Mac—a browser with comparatively weak standards compliance. There are a few minor glitches in the rendering of lists, but nothing that calls attention to itself or looks out of place.
The situation is woefully different with IE6.x/Win, which does a poor job of rendering the page, at least from an aesthetic point of view. On a Macintosh-oriented side, there are limits to how far I'm willing to go to pander to the willful ineptitude of a browser that runs on another platform. The pages are readable, and the navigation works—it will suffice.
If you are using IE (and especially if you're using IE/Win), please consider using a standards-compliant browser, both because it will improve your overall experience of the web, and because it appears that the only thing that will convince Microsoft to fix their bugs is a loss of marketshare.
Source files are edited using BBEdit.
The web server is Apache, running under MacOS X.
References
The SSMUG webmaster recommends the following resources:
- Eric Meyer on CSS, by Eric Meyer, New Riders, 2002.
- Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman, New Riders, 2003.
- Programming PHP, by Rasmus Lerdorf and Kevin Tatroe, O'Reilly, 2002.
Comments
The SSMUG webmaster is happy to receive any comments, questions, or suggestions for improvement, including thoughtful criticism of page design and/or technology choices.