Web Standards

This pages should conform to XHTML 1.0 and CSS, they don't use any browser specific features. To get an appealing result in Browsers which don't support CSS positioning, the whole page is arranged in tables, and the navigation is again constructed in tables. The sizes are determined by a transparent filler image. This technique does not allow for a better WAI rating than A

I don't try to stick to this standards just for the standards, but in my experience, authoring is less painful in the long run (not in the short term!). Standards compliance forces one to remove all errors, think a second time about structure, and thus leads to a much more structured and clean page. This in turn makes maintenance much easier.

During he developement of this site I became more and more focused on an old programmers rule: 'dont code the same thing in two places, instead reference it'. Well this seems logicaly and clear but it is violated on numberous occasions, it is so quick to just cut & paste a code segment. After changeing a lot, I finaly ended with the styles defined in one Style sheet, and each style assigned with a class attribute to the html element.

Additionally, as I am lazy, I create this pages with webmake. This allows me to create a consistent navigation and look & feel over all pages without much hassle. Webmake takes some source files and creates the html files for a static web site from them. After a change, it only modifies the target files which are affected by this change. This static web site is then published with FTP to my ISP.