From Strict to Transitional

So, one of the major things I am trying to do with my site is make it accessible according to the standards of the W3C, as mentioned before. I had been trying to get all of the coding to follow their strict XHTML standards, but I found that with the new CGI search code, I had to switch everything to transitional XHTML standards. This means that it contains elements of both the old standards, and the new. What it means for my site, is that for one tiny little art of the search feature, I had to go from strict to transitional (strict doesn't allow a target window to be opened as part of the form tabs).

Does this change anything for the viewer of the site itself? Nope, you probably wouldn't even notice it if I hadn't mentioned anything. It wasn't even much work, thanks to the features of the web page editor I use (thanks Dreamweaver!!!) Since all my pages are based on templates I have designed, all I had to do was update the template and save it. Dreamweaver automatically saves all of the pages that use the changed template, so from there, all I have to do is upload the new pages. This process is done through FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Its a program that takes files from one place, and transfers it to another place. Pretty amazing program, but apparently simple.

I also came up with the idea of color-coding words on the dictionary pages I have on the site. For definitions that belong to a certain subject, they will have that color background. For example, my geology pages are orange, so all geology definitions would have an orange background. I figure this might be visually appealing and helpful for people just looking for words under a certain subject.