I've been trying to make this weblog XHTML compliant. For those non-techies out there XHTML is the modern version of the HTML web 'language'. It's a dialect of XML which is .... oh nevermind. I guess this post is for techies.

The multiple articles per day had to be revisited because it seems that '+' is not allowed in a 'name' attribute. I use named anchors on the index page. These also aren't allowed to begin with numbers. Sigh. All my articles start with numbers. Fixed that. Found a table bug thanks to the XHTML validator .

But there are still some sticky wickets and pages of non-compliance data. All of these are in the articles themselves, which were created by the editor (design) mode of the web browser - in this case Firefox. So Firefox edit mode isn't even close to XHTML compliance. It's actually some of the ugliest HTML I've ever seen.  But wait - it gets worse. If you edit a page which is XHTML compliant, Firefox will gratuitously butcher it into non-compliance for you.

Which makes it particularly ironic that I wrote this weblog application primarily so I wouldn't have to type HTML in my diary any more. But if I want it to be standards compliant, I've got to dump the web editor and go back to typing (X)HTML.

For now, I'm only going to make the application itself XHTML compliant. Someday they'll fix the browser. No sense banging my head over and wasting hundreds of hours fixing somebody else's bug. 

I've checked out a bunch of the major uber-blogs. Sticky apps designed to create social networks. Probably half of all US teenagers are on one of the things. It's mighty lonely being an old geezer in one of these places. You never get invited to anything of significance save perhaps an an occasional FBI sting. Why is an old geezer checking out sites where teens hang out? But I don't really care who's on the things, I'm just checking out the software.

I also figured out what was missing.

These sites appeal to youth because they're all designed around creating lists of 'friends' who all read and comment on their other friends. Us adults don't usually blog to socialize. How to turn a weblog into an indispensable tool? I know. Anybody want to start a software company?

Just because the software allows titles doesn't mean I have to use them. Never cared for 'em myself. It's just another piece of data of questionable value that has to be thought up and then stored somewhere.

See what I mean? The reason for this is precisely because there are now categories. If one rants about ten different things in the course of a day, it isn't right to put it all into either one category or ten categories. They are ten different things - and each should have the option of being filed separately.

Lot of work the last couple of days... Software - the job that's never done. I've been catching up with the competition. Categories for the last few days. Today titles and multiple entries.   

So you might notice that there's a 'Categories' heading over on the sidebar. I'm still testing but it looks like I've got categories now. I'll file this under 'software'. Note that you won't see much other category contents until I start going through history and assigning message categories on past messages.