About This Site
Quick Overview
The current version of the White River Golden Retriever Club website (WRGRC.org) was initiated in June, 2005 with the redesign of the original website, originally located at http://www.goldenpaws.org. The redesigned website is intended to be near fully standards compliant. That is, it is near fully compliant (in a strict sense) XHTML 1.0, as recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium in 2002. It is also meant to approach compliancy with the cascading style sheets specification by the same organization.
This site is also meant to be java-free to promote cross-browser compatibility. Without Java or any software required to be downloaded onto the client computer, it should maintain a more universally consistent website. Unfortunately, I am learning this does not seem to be an easy thing to do. In the screenshots section, this becomes apparent.
Validation was done using the w3 validator. For XHTML, the validator can be found at http://validator.w3.org/ and for CSS, the validator can be found at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. All pages are fully XHTML valid except for the photo albums. When viewing photoalbums, a click on a photo will reveal a larger version of that photo in a new window. This new window using a
target="_blank" in the link. This is bad, but will have to do until I decide how to best resolve the issue. The CSS files are all valid except for the opacity settings which are only used for the header shadow (as I recall).
Interaction with Other Applications
This site is beginning to interact with other applications! I have tried to make exporting information as easy as possible, though the capability will probably be limited in the near-term.
First, in the members only section, I have activated buttons that export electronic business cards via vcard contact information into your favorite contact database (Microsoft Outlook, Google Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.).
Second, in all appropriate sections, I have activated Microformats which will allow intelligent computer applications to recognize contact information (phone number, etc.), addresses, and calendar events. It should work most ideally browsing on blackberrys, or iphones, or other mobile devices that support such markup. I honestly don't believe this feature will be used unless much, if at all. The overlap of dog aficionados and high-tech gadgetry is very small. Maybe as more browsers become aware of such data will it be useful. For example, Mozilla's Firefox, version 3 will have microformat recognition built in (I hear).
Screenshots
Are you interested in statistics? You can find out who as visited this site through use of a free statistics generation package, called AWStats. It is not updatable from the web, but it does update every hour. Anyway, here are the statistics on the WRGRC site. The anonymity of the site is still maintained, as there is no tie between the visitors and the visited pages. This is, more or less, a tool to help us better develop the website and understant what is useful to the visitor.
Firefox 1.0.7
Ubuntu 5.10 - i686 GNU/Linux (02 January, 2006)
This screenshot is using Firefox version 1.0.7. It is almost exactly what I intended the site to look like as this has been the browser that I most often use to preview the site. There are some error in the viewing, however. The most obvious can be seen on the site-navigation tabs on the left-hand side. There should be 1 px black lines between the tabs (such as "About WRGRC") and subtabs ("membership information"). These lines will show up and dissapear as one scales the text and therefore it must be an issue where I am canceling out pixel padding with type-scalable margins. I have not found the root of this issue.
Konqueror 3.4.3
Ubuntu 5.10 - i686 GNU/Linux (02 January, 2006)
This screenshot is not too different from the above Firefox screenshot. It has the same problem of the missing lines (between tabs and subtabs) but also has the missing black line between all of the inactive tabs (non-white) and the main body of the page. This, again, changes depending on the font scaling and therefore I probably have similar padding/margin issues as the firefox problem. Hopefully this, and the firefox problem will be solved in upcoming corrections to the layout.css file. Furthermore, Konqueror does not support the opacity setting (see the banner and text shadow in the header). Opacity is not an approved css element, and Konqueror allows this to fail reasonably gracefully as opacity is simply ignored. There is another issue with Konqueror problem which is words (for example "conformation") will disappear if positioned in the right place (when it shows up between the calander and the main front-page picture. The cause of this is unknown but I can't reproduce it in other browsers.
Opera 8.51
Ubuntu 5.10 - i686 GNU/Linux (02 January, 2006)
Woah! This is even worse. There is about a 1em space between the left tabs and the body section which looks bad. Opacity is again (like Konqueror) not understood, but this can't be held against Opera. The font settings for Times (the text in the header) are very "pixelated" which looks poor. This one will require some work. I don't know if Opera or Firefox is more standards-compliant and this knowlege might help determine how to fix it. That is to say, this fix is not as easy to solve as a render issue between Internet Explorer and Firefox because Internet Explorer allows for special css definitions to be sent to it (to make up for poor standards compliance). This makes fixing a website for IE specific bugs easy (changing the css file only readable by IE). This, I must leave as a "more to come".
Firefox 1.0.7
Windows XP - SP2 (03 January, 2006)
This version is pretty much identical to to Firefox 1.0.7 on Linux. I can't particularly tell any difference, except the horizontal black lines between the tabs and substabs on the left-hand side actually show up. This is likely due to a font, or a size of font issue. This is perhaps the closest to the intended site. Even the shadows on the active tabs on the left-hand side look they intended.
Internet Explorer 6.0.2900
Windows XP - SP2 (03 January, 2006)
This page doesn't look bad, primarily because there is a special iestyle.ccs file that changes the page particularly for IE. The only obvious flaw is the subtab dark blue area on the left-hand side do not fill the tab positions fully. They seem short by about a pixel around. It is not particularly obvious except when the shadow resides in a subtab, it looks somewhat funny because the darkest section (immediately below the active tab) is chopped off.
Submit a Screenshot
If you have a browser that I have not listed here that shows up differently, please do not hesitate to send it to me. Please be as specific about your browser as possible (including version, date you took the screenshot, etc). Please send it to me by emailing and I will reply.