After moving on-campus at Tri-State University, I no longer had any need of a dial-up ISP, so I am now without a web hosting account. I am currently looking for a new place to host my web site, but in the mean time it is only available to people with local and/or network access to my computer (that means the Tri-State campus network).

It seems that there is a problem with older (ie. Netscape 3, M$IE, etc.) web browsers displaying the source code (!!!) of web pages instead of rendering them if they use the (proper) XML declaration at the top of the page. Of course, I had no way of knowing this until someone in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html pointed it out. The offending declaration has been removed from my code, and since these pages are all conforming UTF-8 (heh heh) it is still valid XHTML 1.0. Happy surfing! (I must point out here that Lynx had no problems rendering pages with the XML declaration. Maybe the Open Source authors knew something that their Closed Source competitors didn't?)

Over the past few days (it is May 15, 2000 while I write this) I have been converting many of my old "HTML tricks" (which are allowed by the standards) to the proper way of doing things: Cascading Style Sheets. In doing this, I have noticed that many web browsers out there just aren't up to snuff. Netscape Communicator 4.x, for example, seems to think that URLs specified in stylesheets should be relative to web pages, and not the stylesheets themselves. The CSS standard says "Thou shalt make all URLs relative to the style sheet" and Communicator just blindly goes and does something else! What kind of morons are writing web browsers these days? (To Netscape's credit, Mozilla displays the proper behavior.) So, many visitors to this web site may find that the backgrounds don't seem right, or the bullets have gone south, or whatever. THIS IS YOUR BROWSER'S FAULT, NOT MINE! Everyone should be using Konqueror by now, anyway.

As promised, I've finished upgrading the old almost-HTML I had been using to XHTML 1.0 (transitional). This was a fairly easy task. The hard part was getting WML to generate my XHTML code. However, using WML I can create consistent and valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup. Add in a little CSS and you get pages which look pretty much the same in any web browser, from Netscape Communicator, to Mozilla, Konqueror, and M$IE, and even Lynx! In fact, it has been my hope all along to make The Home of AlexDW accessible to people using non-graphical web browsers. The other "new technology" that I'm using is called Portable Network Graphics.  There's a reason for this which has absolutely nothing to do with accessibility: a few months ago, a company called Unisys announced that they would begin charging royalties for the use of their patented LZW compression algorithm.  Since LZW is used to compress GIF images (the most popular
image format on the web), nearly everyone with a web site would have to pay Unisys a royalty, including me.  The rates cited on their web site were $5000 per site for up to two servers, more for commercial sites.  Since I don't have an extra $5000 lying around to
burn on a stupid patent license (I just built a new computer, remember?), I decided to use an alternative graphics format, namely PNG.  PNGs are technically superior to GIFs, but current browser support is limited.  (In my opinion, a few people not seeing
images is quite a lot better than me shelling out $5000.) You can find out more about the PNG image format and the GIF controversy in a Linux World article entitled Open source graphics with PNG.