My Conversion to Web Standards

February 22, 2006

My Conversion:

By Larry McDowell, Mountain Vista Technologies, INC

While working in the technology field for over 10 years, I have had my fair share of creating web sites. I had always shied from this corner of IT because I never liked the creation process that WYSIWYG gives you. Too much clicking and dragging and my creation never rendered in the browser like I thought it would. Granted, I could have hand coded the HTML but I was, frankly, too lazy. There wasn’t the structure that I craved; there weren’t any standards.

Along Comes CSS and XHTML

I was asked to deploy a forum board/informational site ASAP and I was in need of a solution. I stumbled upon Community Server which was ASP. NET based and very flexible and best thing, it was free. While configuring this package, I found out that I could customize the look and feel of the site using CSS. Began messing around and asking questions and came up with a new look. The site has been neglected because of some other projects that I have had on my plate but improvements are in the works and it is now starting to become the site that I envisioned.

My only gripe with Community Server was that I couldn’t control the entire look with this package. There were a lot of ASP. NET modules I didn’t know the first thing about and couldn’t modify. In my quest for more customization, somebody referred me to CSS Zen Garden. Seeing so many different layouts with the same XHTML code was pretty cool, to say the least. It opened my eyes to the potential CSS had to offer. I was hooked.

I’m Sold

So that’s it! I’m sold! I’m now a web standards guy. I, by no means, am some sort standards freak that preaches it’s the only way but it’s definitely how I will approach things. I Still have much to learn and new ideas to experiment with, but I’m excited with what lies ahead.