Hello, everyone. Welcome to my website.
05-27-08: Converting some URLs to PURLs
10-02-07: Modified style sheet
04-12-07: Added page for network security course I'm taking
02-15-07: Added a page with information about the format of the Award BIOS boot logo.
05-15-05: Converted the entire site to XHTML, which is HTML reformulated as an XML doctype. This is the future of the web. I also made some other changes, including deleting the 'fancy' stylesheet.
04-19-05: Did some general cleanup: removed several pages that I felt no longer serve any useful purpose; removed some JavaScript that is probably not really needed anymore; moved the tables of contents; removed all literal mentions of my email address. The last one needs a bit of explanation: I want to reduce the chances of my email address being picked up by spammers. The address is still given in 'mangled' form at the bottom of each page; just replace the appropriate words with the appropriate punctuation.
07-06-02: Now slightly redesigned, with improved style sheets. Yes, sheets, plural; if you're using Netscape 6.x or (even better) Mozilla (maybe IE 6 as well?), go to View > Use Style > fancy to see my fancier style sheet including alpha-gradient backgrounds for all the headers! I love PNG! Okay, so it's an experiment, but it does illustrate what you can do with style sheets, and it adds absolutely zero clutter to the main content of my site.
02-17-02: After being offline for some time, this site is back; I am now hosted by my ISP, Icehouse Internet Services.
05-05-01: Decided to unclutter the page a bit by moving my ramble on HTML to another section of this page. No immediate plans to move it to a separate page.
02-13-01: Added tables of contents to most of the individual pages (was needed badly for the IF page).
12-27-99: Updated the document type declaration for my pages to refer to HTML
4.01, removed tracker from site, added META elements for
"Author" and "Contents" (may add others in the future), changed color of interactive fiction page to a light gray so
that the area of the Zork applet will be fully visible in browsers
that don't support style sheets (or at least borders in style sheets). One of
these days, I'm going to move that ramble about content and style into a
separate document, since it doesn't really seem to belong in this section.
11-27-99: Found out that my Web host, Crosswinds, lost all the data from my Web page, so I'm having to re-upload everything; removed frames design as it is getting in the way of things; reformulated entire site using htp, a very useful preprocessor for HTML.
08-17-99: Added a touch of JavaScript to animate the word "independently" below. So far, only implemented for Internet Explorer.
These pages are coded almost completely by hand. I don't believe in WYSIWYG editors. They tend to produce bad, invalid or even ill-formed HTML. I have also tried to make it friendly to Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Lynx (a text-based browser). This means writing good HTML.
As a matter of fact, I once spent a considerable time on the Web site of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and learned much about HTML, style sheets, etc. I strongly recommend that if you haven't already done so, learn about proper HTML and about style sheets (in particular, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is the most widely accepted, being a W3C recommendation).
You have probably guessed by this point that this page uses CSS for as much of the style as possible. The advantages of using style sheets are that they allow one to separate style from content (which allows you to make your pages more accessible -- and if used correctly, style sheets "transform gracefully" [i.e. browsers which don't support them will have no trouble]), something which is badly needed on the Web; that pages with style sheets are much cleaner, so they are easier to read, both for humans and for machines (especially ones with older browsers); and that you actually have more control over many aspects of style, including layout. (Of course you don't have absolute control over layout. But then we never did with HTML either.) If you examine the source for this document, you will notice very little style markup in the content.
I specify the style for these pages in a style sheet, where I can
specify properties for elements such as P,
A, H1 and EM. Just about everything that
can be done with HTML can be done with
CSS: background colors and images; even for positioning elements independently of the rest of the content. You may even
notice (if your browser supports it) that this and other paragraphs on this
site are justified, something which HTML just did
not provide by itself! There are many other things which only
CSS can do, such as border styles,
margins, paddings (spacing
in an element which surrounds its content and includes the element's
background, in contrast to margins, which allow the background of the element's
parent to show, and which collapse with those of other elements),
specifying images for bullets in real lists, etc.
Last updated: Tue May 27, 2008
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