Main Points

Semantic XHTML Template

SemanticXhtml.aspx saw some major transformations. The first really key element was that this was the template being used during the development of the contact form. It's ironic that the contact form was never implemented across the website on this version, it's presence here is therefore slightly anachronistic. But then this was really never used as a site template. The contact form simply instigated so much change that it was important to show this stage of the template's development. After several abortive experiments with the contact form, it became evident that our markup was not tuned well enough.

After consulting with POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) experts at Sitepoint (www.sitepoint.com), we rewrote the XHTML for the navbar. The basic idea behind POSH is that your markup should be exclusively done up working with your content; the markup describes what things are, not how they are meant to look. The beauty of it, is that this frees you to concentrate on the strengths of each phase: structure is the only thing you're concerned about when you're writing good POSH XHTML, appearance is the only thing you're concerned about when you're working on the CSS. It makes the CSS a little more difficult to code, but the overall time you save writing your XHTML markup balances it and you wind up with a much more usable, accessible, and accurately described page. One of the key results was that the navmenu links are lists of related items, and once they were in a list structure, aligning all the links to the left like a menu in a desktop application became not only possible but the easiest solution. That's one reason that this point in the template development was so important, because it launched the new look of the menu bar modeled on typical program menus. Here you can see it in it's intermediate form before we went all the way.

This version of the template also demonstrates our first serious solution to the contact form. This is the version of the contact form that we were happy enough with to sit down and tailor the contact email VB code for Earth Chronicle. Last... and probably least, we did finally reincorporate the page forward and page back buttons to make it easy to move through a series of linearly related pages. This is not a typical feature of most of the webpages, but an important one for the pages it's incorporated into, so it's included here to show it off.

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