Updates for this Web site

Published on 6 Jul 2006 at 12:25 am.
Filed under Web stuff.

Sorry for not posting lately, but I have been backed up by working on things in my free time and have been catching up on my reading/watching things (e.g., the Fantastic Four movie). That said, since my last post, I have updated the Web site a little bit. They are:

1. New look — I decided it was long past time that I modified the design of the site enough that I was really not using the Nepture theme for WordPress. This new design uses less HTML markup and less CSS code, in addition to using no longer using images for background colors and such, all causing a small download size for users.
2. Faster loading scripts — thanks to Dean Edward my scripts should now load when the DOM is loaded, but before all content (i.e., images) is done downloading. This should work in browsers that use the Trident, Gecko, KHTML/WebKit, and the newest Presto layout engines, or in other words Internet Explorer/Maxathon, Firefox/SeaMonkey/Mozilla/Netscape, Konqueror/Safari, and Opera 9. Users of Opera before 9 and for really old browsers are stuck waiting for the browser to finish loading. Sorry.
3. Improved site security — this one I’m a little unsure of. I can’t find the link I had discussing this, but it made it sound like one could inject additional header information to turn my Contact link into a spammer’s heaven. I now strip out “\r\n” from all fields to correct this. I think this will secure things better. That said, if anyone knows more on this please comment!
4. Bug fixing — Fixed a bug in my To DOM script over in my Work section. It wasn’t a bug in previous versions, but somehow editing stuff introduced a bug. In fixing it, the script now takes two parameters (the string and the object that has nodes added to) instead of one. While working on this post it just occurred to me make one simple change that made the code slightly less ugly, and eliminated a recursive call. Yaaa.
5. True XHTML — Moved the site to true XHTML for Firefox at least. I’ll test it tomorrow in Opera 9 (I don’t have it installed on this machine and don’t feel logging in as an Administrator to test it). I’d like to hear from someone to let me know about Safari/Konqueror. You’ll know if you’re getting your page in true XHTML and you see <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> as the first line in the source. Of course, since Internet Explorer does not support XHTML served with the correct MIME type (and because the XML decleration sends Internet Explorer into quirks mode), I serve the page in good ole text/html.

Please, let me know your thoughts. I’m particularly interested in the last point.

Update: Tested it in Opera 9, and it seems that it gets the correct MIME type too. Still would like to hear from people for Safari/Konqueror folks.