Here is a bit of my site dedicated to rants and raves about the World Wide Web, browsers and web-related mark-up and programming languages such as HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, PHP and Perl.
There is an HTML tutorial which also includes some basic information on CSS and a rant about the crap HTML out there on the web, that inspired my tutorial.
There is another rant about my old hosts.
So what makes me such an expert? Well, I haven't designed that many sites, but I have redesigned this site many times and learnt what makes a good maintainable site that way. Here are a few sites I have worked on:
- My personal site
- With my personal site, I don't really care much about things not working quite right in one or two broken browsers (such as Netscape 4.x or Internet Explorer), so I can play with cutting-edge CSS and XHTML and my latest design and navigation ideas.
- NCTeaParty.co.uk
- A site written for the NCT's Disney-sponsored fundraising event. The design is by Nigel Dale, with not inconsiderable changes courtesy of Disney's PR people. The coding is entirely my own. It uses a cross-browser compatible, accessible, tableless pure-CSS2 design and layout applied to valid HTML 4.01. It uses a client-side HTML generator written in Perl to generate the pages prior to uploading.
- NCT :: Breastfeeding Awareness Week 2003
- A site written for the NCT again, and again with the look and feel primarily by Nigel Dale. The clever stuff is mainly the same as with the NCTeaParty.co.uk site.
- EB-Lite
- A website for the EB-Lite instant messaging client. The site is written in HTML 4.01 Strict and again uses my trademark pure-CSS2 design and layout, all generated by an internationalised PHP backend for easy translation of pages into other languages. The overall look and feel of the site owes a lot to Nick Stenning, but the coding and markup is me.
- Individual Project Administration System
- An interactive web-based internal administration system for the department of Computing, allowing students to specify which final-year projects they want to do, staff to suggest ideas and automating the final process of matching students to projects and supervisors. This was written by a team of myself and four others as a final year group project. I and another member of the team were later paid to enhance the site further. It uses a mixture of PHP and Perl and is backed by a PostgreSQL database.
There is also a rave about my favourite browser, Opera, including a useful add-on for web developers and hopefully soon some tips, tricks and more stuff.
I have some other stuff which I wasn't sure if I should put in this section. In the end I decided to put it in the Linux software section. This includes the tv2html script for converting XMLTV television listings into HTML web pages; and html2highlight a script that converts an HTML (or any other XML-like SGML document) into a HTML page showing the document's source code with naïve syntax highlighting.