This site is under construction. At this time, the links in the navigation bar at the bottom of the page lead nowhere. Updates occur at random intervals—basically, whenever I get around to it, which isn't very often.
This site is my learning laboratory for website development. I've known HTML tagging for years, but like almost everybody who learned web design in the early days of the web, I've got into the habit of using all kinds of hacks and deprecated tags. So I'm using this site to teach myself XHTML and CSS. My goal is to design an attractive site that uses clean and logical code. Once I feel comfortable with XHTML and CSS, I hope to move on to Flash, XML, and more esoteric technologies—XSL anyone?
I'm developing this site on a 1.5GHz 17" PowerBook G4. To write the code, I'm using BBEdit 8.2, a flexible and powerful text editor with a great built-in toolkit for generating and checking code. I'm using the Unicode (UTF-8) character set, so that I can drop in Devanagari letters if I need to. Unicode also lets me generate characters such as the em dash in the previous paragraphs.
One casualty of my goal of writing clean, hack-free code is browser compatibility. To my knowledge, no browser supports the XHTML and CSS specifications perfectly, although many come very close. Rather than clutter up the code to come up with workarounds, I've chosen to stick to the specs and wait for the browsers to catch up. So if you're viewing this site with Internet Explorer, for example, it won't render properly. As you may know, Internet Explorer for the Mac is far from current; Microsoft ceased development on that product in June 2003. Why IE for Windows doesn't support CSS properly is anybody's guess. But there are plenty of fine alternatives. For the Mac I recommend current versions of Safari, Camino, or the little-known Shiira. Browsers that work fine on both platforms are Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, and the much-maligned Netscape.
The web hosting company I'm using is a wonderful little outfit called YoHost, which I recommend highly. YoHost is owned and operated by my friend Brett Garrett. Brett's a terrific guy and, to my bewilderment, single. But I digress.
In a few days, I'll put up a link soliciting your feedback. Until then, thanks for looking at my work in progress.