About This Website

This website has been designed to be maintained by a hiker, using a text editor. A more professional design could be achieved by a web developer using commercial tools, but the content would suffer.

Web Standards

World Wide Web Consortium: Known as W3C, this is the body that determines offical web standards.
XHTML 1.0: This site is written in XHTML 1.0, complying to the "Strict" DTD. You can click on the W3C logo at the bottom of the page to confirm this!
CSS 2.1: This site uses a cascading style sheet, hphc3.css, which controls the website format on your browser screen and on your printer.
Web Pages That Suck: This web page doesn't suck. We read Vincent Flanders to keep it that way.

Other Resources

Text Editors

This website is written and maintained with a text editor. The HTML language actually is quite simple. There are lots of text editors that provide anything from syntax highlighting, to help selecting the next code element. There are editors out there that edit web pages graphically. As far as I can tell, these are at least as hard to learn as HTML itself. A graphical editor is not enough to write conforming code. You need to understand the language.

Perl

The navigation menus are maintained on the development computer using a Perl script. Perl is available for Windows. Perl is a convienent language for processing text, particularly for search and replace operations, which is how the menus are managed. There are no Perl scripts running on the website itself.

Active Scripting -- NOT!

There are no scripts running on this web server. There is no JavaScript, or any other active stuff running on your computer as a result of this website.

If you have set your machine to prompt you before running active content, and you are prompted on this website, then something has been attached to your browser session. Exit your browser, restart it and come back.

To Dos

I would appreciate feedback on how this thing looks on mobile devices. The new, fancy cell phones do not identify themselves as "handheld". They look like computers with proper screens. The stylesheet looks at the screen width to try to ID the device. The webpage looks fine on my HTC phone. I am curious about all the others.