Well, having decided to make the site conform to strict XHTML validation had one serious flaw that was annoying me. Strict XHTML does not have a target attribute for the anchor tags. This of course means that you can't easily have links to external sites open in new windows. I actually found quite a few javascript examples that would solve the problem for me, but with each example there were comments that it is a "Bad Thing To Do".
The argument is that XHTML strict restricts the page to content and semantic information only. Since the target attribute is actually user interface information, it does not fall into those categories. There were also a number of people who made the valid point that they disliked having sites open new windows for them.
I tend to agree that sites should not force new windows on the user, but I also wanted to give an easy way for them to open a new window should they wish to. I find when I'm on a site like Slashdot I often forget to open the links in new tab, but that's really what I want to do.
My solution to this is to put icons beside the external links so the user can choose to open the link in a new window or in the
current window. I'm far, far too lazy to want to actually type out each link twice though, so I modified some of the javascript
I'd found to create these icons instead. So when you see all the little
icons next to links, that's why.
The code itself is pretty simple, and works in IE, Mozilla, and Konqueror for sure. I haven't tested Opera or Safari. You can see a commented version of it here.
Looks like I hadn't quite made the site up to the standard I wanted it. Should be almost there now except the footer on IE will be right under the content instead of at the bottom of the page on pages without enough content to fill the screen. Not that big a deal but annoying none the less. Hopefully IE 7 will fix this.
Update: Found a nice workaround for the problem I was having, which was essentially that having both a height and min-height attribute in any CSS style screws up either Mozilla or IE.
The site was long overdue for an update. So this last weekend I finally sat down to take care of it. The aim was to have a site that would not only look quite a bit nicer, but also pass the strict XHTML 1.0 validation.
There are already far too many sites out there that complain about the CSS rendering of Internet Explorer, so I won't bother too add to it except to say that what could have been an easy 4 or 5 hour job turned into a 2 day ordeal as I tried to make sure that Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Konqueror all would render correctly, as well as have the site validate to strict XHTML 1.0 compliance.
However, the site is now up to code and both renders correctly in all the browsers I've tested it on and validates... And I know more about CSS layout than I care to.
