This site strictly adheres to the W3C guidelines regarding XHTML1.0 (Second Edition), CSS1, CSS2 and even various stable parts of CSS3.
But why??
The answer, in my opinion is simple, the Internet should be accessible to as many people as possible, and to effectively do so requires a site to be available to the widest range of devices possible, from modern graphical CSS compliant browsers, mobile internet devices like PDA’s, text only browsers like Lynx, or even aural & Braille browsers for the visually or auditorally impaired.
Using valid markup means also means you develop only one version of any page, and it’ll degrade gracefully when viewed in older devices, and will also be supported as and when new Internet devices are concieved and appear on market. Saving time, effort and money.
Below is a list of how well popular graphical browsers render this site as intended by me.
Close to perfection, if there ever was such a thing!
Pretty good & degrades gracefully with what CSS they don’t understand
Poor or no CSS support at all, so not as pretty as what can be done
All this wizardy is done purely via CSS, i.e.: The stylization is completely seperated from the content, XHTML. Behind the scenes, content negotiation occurs so that XHTML compliant browsers will recieve these pages as application/xhtml+xml so that they work with all the advantages that XML brings. Non-XHTML browsers will just get the same content served as text/html, which is allowed by the specification for backwards compatibility reasons.
If you wish to read more on the Web Standards initiative, their homepage is a great resource.
WordPress and Gallery are the web-applications which currently power this site and both use a server side scripting language called PHP. It’s common, simple and lightweight and is also used by a project I’m involved in, phpBB. :D
Server wise, it is a dual Intel® Pentium® IIIS 1.26GHz running Debian 3.1 as it’s operating system. Software wise… Apache-SSL, MySQL 4.1.x and PHP 5.2.x are what create the infrastructure which allows this site to happen at all.
Oh and since everyone likes graphs, as they have pretty colours and all that, here are some (updated every 15 minutes):
