Metadata
The tools I used to write these pages are XHTML, CSS, and PHP.
HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language." I have structured the text in these pages in XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language), which is much like HTML, but the standard is a bit stricter. XHTML is HTML reformulated in XML (Extensible Markup Language), which allows people to define their own tags and such. I have not yet learned XML, but I will.
CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheets." This is how I have added all color, formatting, and positioning to my pages. HTML provides only structure. If you don't believe me, turn off CSS in your browser, and the pages will appear very plain but perfectly clear. Even reading the source is relatively easy because of the lack of extra tags.
One nice feature of CSS is that I have defined different color schemes. If you are using Mozilla or Netscape 6/7, click on the "View" menu and then "Use Style;" you can select from several color schemes. Unfortunately these browsers do not remember which style sheet you like to use for a site, so this is a cool but as yet useless feature. I generally like to change the colors of my site for different occasions (for example, red and green for Christmastime).
Try this form to change the color you view my pages in. (You must have both cookies and Javascript enabled for this to work. This will preserve your preferences between pages and between visits to my site.)
The pseudo-frames effect (as of December 2002, only available in Mozilla or Netscape 7) is also achieved only with CSS. This has several advantages, not the least of which is that it makes the page much more accessible to text browsers such as Lynx and also to software for the blind or otherwise disabled. Naturally CSS is imperfect, and full support for it is not available in many browsers, but it is far more suited to the purpose of formatting than HTML, which was only designed to provide structure, not format.
In most cases CSS also degrades much more gracefully than HTML. For example, a viewer of this page in Internet Explorer would assume (before he read the text) that I fully intended it to look the way it does to him. (It is true that I considered IE in the page's design, but I would prefer IE to be a bit more standards-compliant.) Similarly, a Netscape user might not notice some weirdnesses with color or plain formatting. I do not consider lack of eye candy to be a catastrophe in web design. As long as the content is easily legible, the page is degrading gracefully and successfully.
The only instance of which I am aware where these pages degrade catastrophically is in Opera. I have decided not to worry about that, because it is clearly a bug in that program, and in any case Opera is a fairly uncommon browser. I have preferred browsers (at least for this site), in this order: Mozilla, Netscape 7/6, Internet Explorer 6/5, Netscape 4, Links, Lynx, Opera 6/5. I am, of course, conscient that my viewers will choose their own browsers and judge my site by it, rather than the other way around, and thus I attempt to provide equal accessibility through all of them.
PHP recursively stands for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor." It is a scripting language which can be and most often is embedded in HTML to add a dynamic element to web pages. I have used it as an interface to a database; I also wrote a custom 404-error page which will send me an email about the missing page, and I have a contact page to allow people to email me without giving my address away to spammers.
I also use PHP to link certain style sheets dynamically, according to which day of the year it is; for example, December gets a red and green theme, February 14 is red and pink, Halloween is black and orange, and July 4 is blue and red. Imagine doing that with just HTML! Would you want to recode it all? (I wouldn't.)
"One person's data is another person's metadata." - S. Sutton