This incarnation of my website was (and still is!) a project many years in the making; its roots go allllll the way back to the now-defunct GeoCities site.  Much of the time has been spent (or wasted) coding frame/virtual frame pages, learning and implementing CSS 2.1, and attempting to conform to HTML 4.01, as well as learning JavaScript on the side.  (If you're curious about the gritty history of the site, or just want to play with the collapse-a-widget, you can read the change log of this site.)

Notes:

• The date-stamps on this page, unlike the rest of the site, are in the web server's local time (UTC-05:00, US Eastern Time), not UTC, because they are implemented with SSI.  (The only exception is the JS mirror stamp below, which is UTC offset to your local time zone.  I think.)
• The JS collapse-a-widget (as I call it) makes the CSS formatting of the tables here a little awkward (this is most noticeable on Mozilla Firefox), but it's acceptable for now.  Simply click on a row that has an underlined filename with a plus (+) next to it to expand that section, and again to collapse it.

---

Site Status

–

Key:  (Directory, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, OO Document, Text.)

---

HTML/CSS Conformance Notes

As of this writing, the pages with a checkmark in the HTML/CSS column above have been validated (using the Validator icons at the bottom of each page) to conform to the W3C's HTML 4.01 (Strict; Transitional where necessary) and CSS 2.1 Recommendations, with the following exceptions:

• All pages – The HTML5 custom data attribute (data-*) is used on many elements, mostly img.
  
  REASON:  Though HTML5 is still a Working Draft (hasn't been published as an official Recommendation), the custom data attribute is far too useful for scripting to be left out, so there it is.   Wouldn't have been able to make the sidebar buttons change back and forth without it.
• XPSHIPS – The proprietary Microsoft attribute allowtransparency="true" is applied to the iframe element that contains the ship pages.
  
  REASON:  This is basically a kludge in order to get transparency in inline frames to work for versions of Internet Explorer prior to 9.  I dislike using kludges, but I tried and was unable to get any CSS solutions to work.  (Why?  Because frankly, IE versions prior to 9 are select, grade-A garbage for their inadequate CSS conformance, JavaScript compatibility, and reliance on proprietary methods, while at the same time every other browser was leaps and bounds ahead of them.  I'm sure many other web page designers would agree.)

Speaking of JavaScript compatibility…

---

JavaScript Compatibility

While I've been learning JavaScript, I've discovered, like so many other Web programmers, that getting JS to work as intended with every browser is like pulling teeth.  (Especially Internet Explorer!)  As I write programs to test on our local web server, I use a suite of browsers to try them with.  My philosophy is: if it doesn't work in Chrome or Firefox, it's probably broken on the other three.  (And yes, I realize testing on both Chrome and Safari is a bit redundant, as they both use the same engine (WebKit), but for completeness I test on both.)

	Date	7.0*	8.0	9.0	3.5	7.0	15.0	5.0.5	11.11
/scripts
ALTSHIP	10/31/11
BUTTONS	10/31/11
COLLAPSE**	10/31/11
EVENTS	10/31/11
EXPAND***	10/31/11
GETMIRROR	10/31/11
GETMODIFIED	10/31/11

* Some or all of the JavaScript programs make IE7 act very oddly, particularly when trying to scroll the document.

** There are actually 3 variations of this program, each set up to collapse a different type of element.  I tried several times to write a unified program that could be called to collapse the requested element type, but I just don't know how to make it work.

*** Its very nature (overlaid elements, opacity, and odd positioning) prevent it from working in IE7.  The centering of the overlaid image doesn't work quite right in some browsers (Chrome, for one).

---

To Do

---

This page was last modified on 06 May 2012.
Page design is ©2012 Thomas Keith / Insectoid.