This is just some site programming notes... The simple idea was to take the current site, and
convert it to :-
a. have a left side navigaion menu,
b. to use CSS positioning, in pace of tables, and
c. use DOCTYPE XHTML 1.0
d. pass W3C validation
Although I have used MS FrontPage for YEARS to do my own site, I had only experimented a few minor times with MS Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (free) Edition (MSVWD), and saw this as an opportunity to give it a good 'check out' ;=))
Since I have this powerful (free) web tool, I did all this in WIN32 (Vista), so take care of the line endings in files ;=(). And as well as using the built in very powerful MSVWD debugger, which runs IE under a debug mode, and allows you to, for example, trace through javascript, I also installed MS Internet Information Services (IIS7) for Windows, and pointed it to the developing site, so I could do immediate checking using IE, and other browsers, on 'localhost'...
See below 'Things To Be Done' for known cavetes ;=))
The first effort was to build two CSS based templates -
1. blank3.html - This is a 3 column format
Left - Naviagtion menu
Content - The information
Right - Snippets
2. blank2.html - This is similar to the above, but without the right side info
snippets
To keep the HTML script looking 'neat' I used Tidy (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tidy/), well actually my own slightly modified version of Tidy ;=)) Since the maintainers of Tidy have close ties to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), this ensures, about 99.9% of the time, that the page will pass their 'validators', so I have not 'checked' every page yet, using it...
In the main I have MAINTAINED all Google advertising, usually in 3 places
1. Top hozontal sort of 'Google' ad bar
2. Right column, when present, as a vertical bar, and
3. Near the bottom, although in some cases this is at the top.
Concerning urchinTracker(), I initially got some errors from this javascript, so left it out for the present, but it could easily be put back at the bottom of each html file ;=()
I had NOT enabled the 'shtml' extension in my IIS7, so a small number of files were changed from 'shtml' to 'html', since as far as I could see no 'server' processing was required in any of these files.
This had to handle pages in subdirectories, and hightlight the current page, so this led to a NEW service in js/template2.js called MainMenu2, with two parameters { 1 - the parent directory, and 2 - the module number per the javascript array }. And these parameters are stored in a <script ... part of each file header, so can be easily changed...
Then I set about 'converting' all the current pages to this new format, mostly keeping exactly the same content, and google advertisments, although some 'moves' were done.
Downloads/scenery-1.0.1.html - the graphical interface - done
mirrors.html - list of mirrors - done
Just some test pages - testpage.htm - testpage2.htm - testpage3.htm -
done
cvs.html leads to some other files
Docs/getstart/getstart.html has many children -
getstartli1.html - done - getstartli2.html getstartli3.html
getstartch1.html getstartch2.html getstartch3.html getstartch4.html getstartch5.html
getstartch6.html getstartch7.html getstartch8.html getstartch9.html getstartch10.html
getstartpa1.html getstartpa2.html getstartpa3.html getstartpa4.html getstartap1.html
getstartap2.html *TBD*
Also the two files done have some 'missing' class definitions, even after including the local
getstart.css file, and thus impossible to 'guess' what was intended by these classes... like
'sectionToc'... the file indicate they were generated by 'TeX4ht'...
And there are quite a number of other 'children' to be done
And probably many more items that I have not yet thought of, or tested/found ;=))
Just some thoughts...
And probably a zillion other things... enahancement can be a NEVER ending project...
This is just my 'personal' preferences...
To make it 'easy' for anyone to try my current pages, locally, on on another site, I have zipped the entire things into a single main zip, plus incremental changes to be overlayed on the first. And if a subsequent incremental 'overlay' zip contains the file 'dellist.txt', then these are files to be deleted before then next overlay, if you get my drift...
| Date | Link | Size | MD5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-03-21 | fgfs-05.zip | 19,333,216 | d9d9560f3668e9bd9dac81b20f029eca |
| Incremental additions | |||
| 2010-03-22 | fgfs-05a.zip | ||
PS: Obviously this particular page will _NOT_ be the same in the zip, or else I get into a never ending size/md5 loop ;=)) In fact, sometimes will have added quite a lot AFTER the zip was created, so only the online version of this file is the latest...
I found MSVWD a very worthy tool. It has the feel that it is a little 'unfinished', and there were a number of small glitches, but all in all I would rate it very GOOD ;=)) One annoying 'glitch' was that the 'editor' could sometimes make a 'mistake', with quite bad results, especially when continually switching between 'Design' and 'Source', and updating - particularly cut and paste. This can be DISASTEROUS ;=(( So make sure you have recent update BEFORE using this 'internal' editor. It does have an option to use external editors, but then you lose all the IntelliSensing...
As with the MSVC counterparts, the most helpful thing is it 'IntelliSensing'. That is, as you type a '<', a dropdown list of elements pops up, so you can just 'choose' the element rather than typing it. And then when you add a space after an element, another dropdown list appears of the possible attributes... and even after selecting an attribute, and putting '="' again a dropdown or popup tooltip gives you an idea of what 'values' the attributes can have.
And all this 'IntelliSensing also works in javascript, CSS, etc.
Well worth the (free) download ;=)) But is it worth the about USD$500 for the 'professional' edition? Well, maybe yes, since I am sure you could then get a 'fix' for the editor bug mentioned. Meantime, in most cases I will stick to my 'trusty' MS FrontPage...