This site is written in HTML5. It
makes use of CSS 3 where
support exists, and so far needs to use no HTML classes or id's, no images, and
no scripts (other than some IE fixes, and Analytics). Among the features it
uses, and the browsers supported for each, are:
- HTML5 semantic elements such as <header> and <footer>.
Should be supported by all browsers (I use a JavaScript hack for IE).
- HTML5 "don't bother with nonsense like closing tags, quotes, and
pointless elements or attributes" features. This will work in all
browsers, since they always supported that anyway.
- CSS 3 selectors. Some styles will not work in any version of Internet
Explorer, resulting in serious ugly. They should work in reasonably recent
versions of any other browsers.
- text-shadow. This should work in any recent browser except Internet
Explorer.
- gradients. It should work in any vaguely recent WebKit,
like Chrome 3 or Safari 4, or in Firefox after (not including) 3.6 Beta 1.
(Technically, this is nonstandard at this point, since the relevant spec is
still only a Working Draft, so I can only use vendor-prefixed properties.)
- @font-face, using TTF (for nice calligraphic rendering of מטרף עלה in
the header). This should work on anything recent except IE.
- SVG in <img>, for the logo. Doesn't work in Firefox (bug 276431).
All content on the site is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 unless
noted otherwise. The logo is from
Wikimedia Commons, altered by me, and the rest is original to me. I use the Ezra
SIL SR font for the header, licensed under the SIL Open Font License.
I construct the pages using a simple script that I maintain in a git
repository.
I opted for static HTML instead of blog software or whatnot for a few
reasons:
- I don't expect to post things very often, so the maintenance overhead
of static HTML shouldn't be too much.
- It gives me the chance to write everything from scratch instead of
having to wrap my head around a skinning system, which is fun. Find me any
real web app that has this little HTML output!
- I don't have to worry about tiresome stuff like security updates or
merging any customizations with new versions.
- Although I'm the principal root on this box and can do whatever I want
with it, I don't actually own it. The primary site hosted here is Total War Center. Although I don't
expect much traffic to RfP, and this is a quad quad-core box with 16G of
RAM, I'd prefer not to post a link to some essay to Slashdot and have
system load noticeably affected because of some slow PHP app. I'm pretty
sure everything would hold up okay if I got even a front-page link on
Slashdot to static HTML (I'm running lighttpd and there are lots of free
resources).
