Meta: Change log archives: 2004

This is a record of (major) changes I've made to the site over the years, starting at the time I switched from HTML to XHTML. It's usually more or less up-to-date.

…text added 2nd May, 2007

Following a tip from W3C, I have also changed the font height from being measured in pixels to being measured in ems to make the site more accessible to people who can't read small writing, but now it looks awful, especially when using Firefox (as opposed to Internet Explorer). It's valid XHTML, whatever it looks like, though. What to do, what to do...

I have fiddled the font heights a little bit and am now in the middle of attempting sidebars, in which to put the links instead of having lists in tables. I did have forms with them in before, but the change to XHTML messed them up and I never looked into how to fix them.

Later…

I want to have three columns, the left-hand one containing links, the centre one containing the main text and the right-hand one containing a message board. I have problems with the width of the message board in Internet Explorer and Firefox. If the window is deemed too small to display all three columns next to each other, the left-hand column is displayed at the top, with the right-hand one at the bottom. The centre column is placed either to the right of the left-hand column or vertically between the left- and right-hand columns. I can't fix it it, so two columns will have to do, and the site will remain sans message board. The lack of message board is also due to another effect I found in Firefox.

The message board seems to cause a funny effect in Firefox: if you move the mouse over the section headings linked to by the table of contents (e.g. "Introduction"), the message board is briefly displayed at the top of the visible page (but only if the proper board is visible at the time) and it acts as if it were a link, but it is not. It is being used as a bookmark, though, but it's being used properly. The first line of the introduction also exhibits this effect. Couldn't fix this, so I removed the message board altogether.

11th November, 2004

Essex University allows its staff and students to have an internal homepage, so I put a copy (with one or two changes) of the home page of this site, and linked it to the rest of this site.

9th November, 2004

The infrastructure is all present and correct, but some of the content is slightly out of date, which needs to be addressed.

28th October, 2004

Copying content from my old site to this site. I do not know how long this will take.

26th October, 2004

Due to yet another change in ISP from Claranet to BTInternet in October, 2004, I was faced with hosting this site on Geocities. This terrible notion finally forced me to get round to asking a Certain Someone to pay for Web space on 123-Reg so I could use my own domain name, pandammonium.org, that I have had for some time now but never used, except for email. The old site at Claranet will be there until such a time when the account is cancelled and Claranet see fit to remove it.

October, 2004

As of today, my Web site is written XHTML, not HTML, except for my blog pages as these are generated automatically by Blogger. XHTML is apparently the future of HTML. I read this on W3Schools and it is their XHTML tutorial that I used as a guide to my Web site's conversion and used W3C's XHTML validator to check I did not write drivel instead of XHTML.

The first step was to make sure all the document is well-formed, which my pages are, so that was not a problem. I had to change all the tag names to lower case, though because I had my tags in uppercase and attributes in lower case. When I write HTML from scratch, I always close the tags, but the option tags were copied from a tutorial site and weren't closed, so I had to close these and all the empty tags. Some attributes weren't enclosed in quotation marks, but these were the ones that I copied and pasted from Google for the search box - naughty Google - and Site Meter for my hit counter.

I used the validator to check what I had done, finding I'd missed a few tags and attributes and what-not here and there. It's really not a difficult task to upgrade from HTML to XHTML, it just takes a bit of time to do it.

1st August, 2004