Not sure what I wanted to do here with the "words" page but I knew if I had a "pictures" page that I darn well
oughta have a words page. It's just good, sound logic. I'm a big picture lover but not much of a writer so this page
may hang in limbo for quite some time. Want words? Read the Bible, read Dostoyevsky, read Robert Frost, read John
MacArthur, just don't expect a lot of reading roun' these-a-heah-pahts pardner. Aiight? Actually, you can rest assured
that if I write anything that I consider consequential enough to be posted here, I'll put a massive blinking banner of
some sort on the home page, so move on. I guess I am pretty good at writing filler text...
Well, I spent the day looking at this page and tweakin' the style sheet. It's funny that we're pushing for standards here and there's still small inconsistencies between the browsers. Really it's a heckuva lot better now though if you write valid markup.
I've had a thought today that seems brilliant: I'm going to take screen captures of this page in different browsers and post the shots here. I'll be able to post shots of IE 5.0 and 5.5 as well as Netscape Navigator 4.7 and 6.0, please feel free to contact me if you can help by supplying a screenshot of a different browser.
Well have a look at the date in the bar above. That's the date that I sat down and tried my hand at the standards compliant page without tables, complete with hidden BUI message ala WaSP and, curiously enough, ala. I must say, I could get used to this...
I've been learning HTML, CSS and javascript for a little over a year now and it's been sort of difficult, I'm much happier playing arteest. However, HTML appeared to be a very simple, logical language when I first began looking at it. I really didn't forsee any problems picking it up. Man, was I wrong. I would build a page, or worse, an entire site, then have a look at it in another browser and BOOM! a nasty explosion. Nothing like my originally crafted (and I use the word loosely) presentation. Thus began my realization that not all browsers are created equal, which in turn gave birth to the learning of countless hacks so that I could present my vision the same way no matter who was looking with whatever browser.
See where the difficult came in? See where the relatively simple markup language became a debugging nightmare?!? I guess you can blame the browser wars, Micro$oft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator were scrappin' it out for market share and building tons of non-standard little extras into their browsers, as well as some just plain bad handling or misinterpretations of the standards.
Now with the release of IE5.5 and NS6, the browser makers appear to have heard the quiet sobbing of frustrated hacks like myself... standards! they're supporting standards! You mean now I can markup a page only one time and have it be interpreted the same by all the major browsers?!? Well, not yet. There's still this problem of all the older browsers out there in use. I've built this page to chip in and help the future of the web, in my own small way I can do my part to encourage someone to upgrade their browser. If this page looks disjointed and ugly, or worse, black and white, you need a new browser. Help do your part to make the web a better place, upgrade.
I won't be updating all my old pages to this new standard but I'm going to make a concentrated effort to do all new pages for this site in this same way. Please understand, I don't mean to alienate anyone who wants to come have a look, I'm just trying to chip in to an effort, to make a difference (and fiddle with the new standard mostly ;)
