site info
This page is here to give a little info about why I created the site in the way that I did.
This site has been created using XHTML and CSS, coded to the W3C standards of XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0, you can check that any page on the site validates against the standard by clicking on the Valid XHTML or Valid CSS buttons down on the left below the nav bar.
As to why I created the site using the standards. The standards were created to be just that, standards, meaning that a site should work fine in any browser that supports them. Support for various standards in browsers is still somewhat dubious, particuarly CSS positioning. However, if people use the standards, and code to them, in time the browsers should improve, meaning all the sites will become accesible to everyone. This should hopefully put an end to the "best viewed in browser X" buttons that are still on a number of sites.
There are some other reasons for doing the site in the way I have. It separates as much of the content from the layout as possible. This means that the HTML file layout doesn't need to reflect the layout of the site, you can see this if you view the source of this page. There is just the header of the page, then directly onto the content.
It may seem like a small and trivial thing but, as an example, if a blind person was to come to the site, using a screen reader application that parsed the source of the page, they would only have to hear the header, then they would get the content, which is afterall what a site is normally about. If the site was done with tables for layout, as became the way a lot of people did sites, they would have had to listen to the nav bar on every page they visited, before they got to the content.
The other nice thing is that if someone visited my site using a browser with no CSS support at all, or were using a text browser such as lynx, they would also get the content without having to scroll through the nav bar. You can see what this might look like if you turn the CSS I am using off. If you are using IE then on the nav bar under techy is a link that will do this (javascript must be enabled). If you are using a browser that natively supports turning styles off then that is the better way to do it, in Firefox for example it's on the view menu under page style -> no style. To get back to how it was scroll down to where the nav bar is in the "text" view, and click the link again, or re-enable the appropriate style in your menu.
It may seem a bit strange that I am saying I have written this site as it is, and that I know that it may not look right on some browsers. I'm happy with this, hopefully it'll encourage people to use more compliant browsers, and by doing things that may not be fully supported yet will hopefully encourage browsers to develop better support. If people continue to design sites that look and work in one browser, at the expense of others, then it doesn't encourage anyone to make better browsers.
I have tested the site in IE6, Mozilla Firefox and Opera 7. It works as it should in all of them. If you're reading this and the site really looks awful, you're probably using an old browser, get one that supports the standards and you should be ok.
If you're interested in learning more there are some links on the links page that have more information about using CSS. If you're interested in how the layout of this site is done, check out my tutorial on how I did it, which you can find on the nav bar.