Yesterday I started my revisions to the Legacy Farm Ltd. website. I have quite a shopping list since I have been very lax in updating it. The three I picked for yesterday were:
- Incorporate a print.css
- Add Creative Commons License
- Change over to XHMTML
The idea for the print.css came from alistapart.com and Eric Meyer. When you want to print a web page you use a different stylesheet. Using a “print.css” you can omit layers and resize others to make it more suitable for printing. To create the css I had to find the names of all my layers and create a new layer for the footer. It was pretty simple task and definitely slick!
The Creative Commons License is something I wanted to do since I heard about it. This license grants the public a practical, general use license without the lawyer mumbo jumbo. Copyright has its place in society but most of us have a very limited interest in it. FUD concerning coyright laws keeps us from sharing photos and content even if they have almost no commercial value.
The change over to XHTML has been long overdue. I tried to go to XHTML last spring but the W3C validator created a long list of problems. I realized that I would have to do more research on XHTML to fix the problems and modify Dreamweaver 4 since it does not support XHTML out of the box. Later in the year Alistapart had a story that outlines changes you can make to Dreamweaver to better support XHTML. This fixed part of the problem. The key to solving the problem ended up with a program I am evaluating called Topstyle. I installed the trial version to see how much help it would be in creating and modifying my stylesheets. Dreamweaver ships with the Lite version and I went to the site to see if a newer Lite version existed. I decided to take advantage of a trial offer on the Pro version. What attracted my attention was the built in support for HTMLTIDY, W3C validator, and Bobby. What I found was a pretty convienent way of converting HTML to XHTML. It pointed out the changes I needed to make and since it is also a HTML editor I was able to make the changes right there. Today I will validate the pages with W3C since the trial version did not include W3C validator. It is in vesion 3.1. To get more info about Topstyle Pro 3.1 or order it click here.