Style ? - Yes! ... But at a High Price !

Well, here's the new site and I'm proud to say it's all xhtml. It all validates, yes it's true. Please check the link to the WC3 validation. Now here's the catch, CSS is great, it provides a level of flexibility, precision, and general tidiness to your site and underlying code that plain old HTML just couldn't never hope to do. If you're develpoment a site in ASP.NET, JSP, PHP and the alike I would strongly recomend that you being using XTHML and CSS just for the advantages of being able to program against your XHTML and CSS code. It's that great...but it can be time consuming.

All this is great but development of the new site this time around was much slower and thus came at a high price. In part because I wanted the code to really sparkle and stand out, I also wanted to be extremely flexible The style switcher is "proof of concept" on how flexible it truly is and...well what it can become. Where the site will go next is to a PHP / mysql driven site, and some googies like movable type. Although I primarily develope and design at the Guggenheim using an ASP.NET (VB& C#) driven CMS intranet, my 3 year free deal with www.1and1.com doesn't included a ASP server, it's an apache server with PHP 4.3 and mysql.

The other half of that story is that developing "two" sites at once is well... almost twice as much work! Along this development path I ran into just about every CSS snag there was in discrepancy in browsers. You see, sure, the code validates, but all that means is that I'm speaking proper XHTM and CSS...and really doesn't guarantee that all the browsers will understand it exactly as I intended it. My major concern was that the site ran and was rendered and parsed properly as possible. The three browser that I was most concerned about were IE 6 for windows, Safari, and the very long in tooth IE 5 for mac. I felt the other browsers would fall in line and for the most part they did. Check out the CSS pages to see the dancing required make it all happen.

So there you have it. Let me know if you run into any strangeness and send me a note if you encounter errors. Thanks -CJB -6/12/05