Version 5 Launched

July 1, 2009

After almost two full years, the Temple of Andrex has finally been upgraded. This upgrade is just as important, if not more so, than any previous one for a number of reasons.

• I have switched it to Wordpress Source, essentially meaning that all of my websites (Carol of the Bells and Project Gforum) now have their posts and content managed through its easy and powerful web interface. It is now easier than ever for me to make updates.
• Since this is officially Version 5, I thought it would be fun to experiment with the fifth version of HTML. This essentially marks the first website since the last Temple of Andrex design almost two years ago for which I have not employed XHTML 1.x. It was a tough decision and one that I plan to carry out in all future versions of my other sites as well. (Techie talk to follow.) Why did I drop XHTML? Because I was serving it as text/html, not application/xhtml+xml because the latter wouldn’t even display in Internet Explorer. What does that mean? Essentially I got to say superficially I was using XHTML, without actually following through and serving it as such. Originally, I went with XHTML because of its strict syntax, but with HTML 5, I can be just as strict on myself. In addition, reading the official specs for both, I came accross a passage that essentially said, “XHTML is suitable for scientific files and poems, but not rich web applications or forums.” Plus, HTML 5 is really cutting edge with a ton of great new semantic tags (such as <footer> and <article>), and I like that, and the next version of XHTML, XHTML 2, is going in a direction I don’t want to follow.
• Version 5 (designated “Space Flare”) also uses two key CSS 3 advancements: Web Fonts and RGBA Colors. Web Fonts, as I described when I launched Carol of the Bells Verion 7, essentially lets me load a font file in a browser, and then use it anywhere on my site. If you’re using Opera 10, Safari 3.2+ or Firefox 3.1+, you’ll see the custom font “Neuropol” set for the navigation and post headers. RGBA Colors, on the other hand, allow for translucency, and you should see the effects in the navigation on the left if you’re using Opera 10, or any recent version of Safari, Chrome, or Firefox. For reference, here is how this site should look:

  

• You may have noticed Internet Explorer has been a little left out, and that’s exactly right. This is my personal site, so I have no problems jettisoning that browser from my testing. I will not hold back my designs based on outdated browsers. This site will barely render at all in Internet Explorer (even the latest version) due to all the HTML 5 and CSS 3 it uses. However, I could have been meaner: I could have chosen to serve this place as XML, and in that case it wouldn’t even load.
• Due to the semantic tags and other nieceties in HTML 5 and CSS 3, this site uses the least amount of images, Javascript, and CSS classes/IDs in one of my “main” websites ever. Overall, the design should be blazing fast despite having a fairly large background image, and that was the reason I finally chose to have one. My previous designs were very largely inefficient, I tried to make the code clean with indenting, commenting, naming things right, etc., but as this site has always been used for me to experiment and grow my web designing skills, the implementation has always been a little sloppy. This time, though, I think I finally got it right. It’s hard for me to look at the source code and conceive a way that I could cut down even more- the only way to speed up the backend would be to convert everything to static .html pages, and that’s not going to happen (need my Wordpress, man, I ain’t going back to editing the RSS feed by hand.)

I’m actually very excited about what I accomplished with this. The Temple has always been a playground for me to try new technologies before employing them on my other, more “important” sites*, and this update is no different. Using HTML 5 and CSS 3, I think I’m finally keeping pace with the growth of the web.

Please keep in mind that I still have content to fill out at this time, so even in Version 5 the trend of the Temple never being fully completed continues.

* Version 1 = Basic HTML = Everything has to start somewhere
Version 2 = Basic CSS = Carol of the Bells design editing
Version 3 = This version was the only Temple design to be someone else’s
Version 4 = Advanced CSS = Carol of the Bells and Project Gforum design creation
Version 5 = HTML 5, CSS 3 = Future Carol of the Bells and Project Gforum design creation

Carol of the Bells was also somewhat of a playground. I didn’t know if I would like Wordpress or how difficult adapting a design to it would be, but after launching Version 7 earlier this year, I knew I’d be sticking with it for a long time. It was also my first real hands-on with Javascript. Project Gforum was a playground as well, I had learned and implemented PHP and MySQL specifically for it, and that same setup was adapted to the Temple last August.