Much of what goes on behind the scenes with this site is experimentation with various web technologies. When the site was initially developed I contemplated using a simple dynamic page structure based upon .ASP or another scripting language, or perhaps using templates based in dreamweaver. In the end the first go-around was standard HTML with stylesheets.

As a quick exercise, I wanted to recreate the structure of the web site using Cascading Style Sheets and the latest XHTML spec. It started as one of those, "let's see what we can do" that turns into a, "wow, it's 4:30am!"

I was able to quickly develop the wrapper of the site completely in CSS and XHTML. Looks similar and is proof that CSS is the wave of the future. But the future is not here yet!

The problem, as it always is with the web, is standards implementation among the various browsers. Depending on the browser, version and platform, implementation is different. For example Mozilla 1.2 was awful, but 1.3.1 was better. IE 5.5 on the PC had some issues, which an upgrade to IE 6.0 fixed. IE 5.2.2 on the Mac was tricky, Safari though was a dream. One could assume that if you have a Mozilla user that they are somewhat avante garde and will constantly upgrade their browswer to the latest version, but of course we all know when you 'assume'....

Of course the power of CSS is that you may develop separate stylesheets for various browsers, but considering that I would need to develop 10+ stylesheets for a web site that has less than 10 pages of content, seems like overkill.