Topic: Front Page vs. Me

My dad likes his FP. I don't like it, so he challenged me to convert his site that he made with FP to something better. I did.

Using FP:
http://norwegianamerican.com/

My Version:
http://norwegianamerican.com/alpha/

I didn't validate all pages so if you find something I missed, please tell! My first validation on it passed, shows how good I am with XHTML and CSS standard.

I'm later going to convert the .ppt files on the FP site to Flash, I'm waiting for some stuff first.

There's no image in the background of the items in your navigation while there's one in the FP version.

Other than that I wonder what's the use of the ttl DIV. Is it here to trick a bit the search bots ?
I've seen <br class="ca" /> at the end of many ( all? ) the content DIVs. Unless I missed something, it can be removed and the margin/padding of the content DIV can be changed accordingly.

And IMHO you could also use an image replacement technique for the H1. But I'm picky here.

That's a clean conversion.

Much nicer, but: http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

Reiso - have you got any links that do a better job explaning this, without all the talking in circles and repetition of the same phrases without explanation?

It is rather hard to make sense of what is being said, and I have not ben able to find anything else that explains the problem at hand.

Most of what I got from that article is "a lot of people don't write valid mark-up anyway, so don't use XHTML". Which leaves me rather unconvinced
But I would like to understand the issue...

The main argument is normally something along the lines of XHTML is not fully supported, if you don't need XML don't use it because it is harder to use really well formed markup.

Which I equate to just being lazy.

I am a bit biased as I use XML all day long, but I really think XHTML is the better standard, and that is what should be used as it puts emphasis on the browser manufactures to get their XML support, and their XHTML rendering instructions nailed down.

The last little bit against XHTML goes along the lines of, if you are not doing anything XML like with your pages you shouldn't use XHTML. But, by not using XHTML you limit your users from doing XML stuff with your content. You never know what a user might want to do with your code, and if it is well-formed and easy to parse you can do almost anything with it.

XML and XSLT are huge business standard, and once you start using it regularly you will be pained when you do not have it, it is very nice and incredibly flexible. Get to know it, and start using it as soon as you can, its knowledge is valuable.

Dan @ Code Town

I agree with WarMage. Besides, it's going to be a pain to bring my standards through a U-turn.