Going X

The transition continues – the website is now based on XHTML Transitional. This was a natural transition. All the hard work was done in the redesign few months ago. CSS based design was the major change, with all the scripts recoded to only use DOM stuff.

At that time, I did not have a satisfying solution for form validation, and there was no time to work on it. I was under pressure to deliver high speed web site and thus no time for trying stuff out.

After the launch, I had plenty of time. Along came the form styling tests, as well as validation ones. I believe that this way of validating is the best of the breed. Script have no impact what-so-ever on the HTML (apart from the field naming convention), thus being the least intrusive. It also works best for ASP.NET pages, as the developer doesn’t have to worry about client-side code emission (VS.NET users will know what I mean).

Another major change is the way Flash is used. Even after redesign, Flash was written using invalid markup. It did not influence page validity as the code was written using Javascript, but I did not like anyway. This is the valid markup now used:

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="660" height="75"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/»
cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0"
data="http://SITE_ADDRESS/file.swf" standby="Loading Flash....">
<param name="menu" value="false" />
<param name="quality" value="best" />
<param name="movie" value="file.swf" />
... alternative content (i.e. img)
</object>

I have more plans for the future. Right now, there are still some server-side decisions regarding what to display to the browsers. And don’t like that at all.