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 being written and maintained on a Linux machine. Linux provides a fantastic selection of programming tools, not necessarily available on other machines. In particular, Linux has lots of text editors, almost all of which do colour syntax highlighting and indenting. Many of them "understand" the XHTML code, allowing you to select tags from a menu.

On Microsoft Windows, Notepad should be enough to manage a web page. Notepad is very simple, which in most cases, is very good. The version that comes with Windows Vista has colour syntax highlighting, which is even better.

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 XHTML 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 need a good menuing paradigm for my hike instructions, accessed from the schedule page. The schedule page itself works. I need to figure out what sort of menu should be attached to the instructions. Note how the menus disappear when you print any of these pages.