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View Full Version : Site design milestone from HTML 4.01 transitional to strict



KLB
07-15-2006, 06:02 PM
Over the past couple of days I crossed a milestone on my chemistry site. I've gone from validating to HTML4.01 transitional to HTML4.01 strict. Now for some noobs who started their sites in the era of XHTML, this may not seem like a big deal, but for a very large site like mine that got it start when Netscape 1.0 was state of the art, such a migration was a major breakthrough.

As part of my code update, I finally got around to not only getting my CSS to validate (which it mostly has), but to also eliminate all warnings.

One of the interesting archeological finds I discovered in my code were isolated pockets of FONT tags that I thought I had eradicated years ago. :eek:

One thing that I was sad to see go was the TARGET element I used on some of my ad links. I can't wait until all browsers support the target pseudo class.

This has been the forth major transition I have made since starting my site back in 1995. The first transition was to validate to HTML 3.0 specifications once they came into existence. My second transition was from HTML 3.0 to HTML 4.01 transitional. My third transition almost three years ago, was to transition from using tables for layout control to DIV tags and CSS.

Now I know what some of you are thinking. Why didn't I transition to XHTML? Well the answer is simple, MSIE does not support XHTML and I didn't want to deal with the unpredictability MSIE's quirks mode could cause. Also, I really didn't want to have to dig through hundreds upon hundreds of pages closing slashes in every BR and IMG tag. I figure that once the majority of the users are using browsers that natively support XHTML I will migrate at that point in time.

Johnny Gulag
07-15-2006, 08:19 PM
Hey!

Great job Ken!!! The only warnings I see on the front page are changing "&" symbols to & instead, I have not checked all the pages obviously :p, so there could be more.

KLB
07-15-2006, 08:52 PM
There will be occassional odd character errors like the '&' symbol because of a dynamic links at the bottom of my menu. These are fed by a third party and every now and then they throw in invalid characters. Beyond those links, which I have limited control over, there should be no validation errors.