2012-08-12 - Validation

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading through a series of articles called The “Web Standards Curriculum” which is basically a set of tutorials on web languages. Most of the stuff I already knew but the thing I found exciting about these articles is that they talked about the standard and best practices way of doing things. So I figured I’d take the time and update my site so that it validates using the online standard checkers. You may have noticed the new footer at the bottom of the page with several badges stating that the site is now valid by those standards. It should be noted though that the HTML5 one is not a badge and does not mean that the site is completely valid HTML5. For one thing I haven’t gotten around to fixing up all the issues on every page and for another the HTML5 validator does not give out badges. I made the image myself based on the others just so I could easily validate any page on the site. It was an interesting experience, as I worked to fix things I found better ways of doing those things that solved other problems. For example I changed the way that the left and right columns are styled so that I no longer have to use a special CSS hack to get things to show up right in Firefox. It also seems to look better in older browsers and just generally works better.

Now most of these changes (If I’ve done things right) shouldn’t be apparent. The actual layout should stay the same with only the underlying structure changing. What you may notice is that a bunch of the images have changed. As I mentioned a while ago the images template files were lost when my hard drive broke so I’ve had to recreate them from scratch. I could have just left them but it’s better for consistency if I have a template file to work with. If in the future I need a new button I can just go back to that file and make a new image that fits in with the rest. The big thing though is the penguin. While I was recreating the buttons I also finally got around to redoing the penguin. I know it doesn’t look as good but I’d rather the logo be a penguin of my own creation than a copy of someone else’s. It’s also probably better for legal reasons; don’t want any angry Linux people attacking me.