As promised, I've finished upgrading the old almost-HTML I had been using to XHTML 1.0 (transitional). This was a fairly easy task. The hard part was getting WML to generate my XHTML code. However, using WML I can create consistent and valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup. Add in a little CSS and you get pages which look pretty much the same in any web browser, from Netscape Communicator, to Mozilla, Konqueror, and M$IE, and even Lynx! In fact, it has been my hope all along to make The Home of AlexDW accessible to people using non-graphical web browsers.

The other "new technology" that I'm using is called Portable Network Graphics. There's a reason for this which has absolutely nothing to do with accessibility: a few months ago, a company called Unisys announced that they would begin charging royalties for the use of their patented LZW compression algorithm. Since LZW is used to compress GIF images (the most popular image format on the web), nearly everyone with a web site would have to pay Unisys a royalty, including me. The rates cited on their web site were $5000 per site for up to two servers, more for commercial sites. Since I don't have an extra $5000 lying around to burn on a stupid patent license (I just built a new computer, remember?), I decided to use an alternative graphics format, namely PNG. PNGs are technically superior to GIFs, but current browser support is limited. (In my opinion, a few people not seeing images is quite a lot better than me shelling out $5000.) You can find out more about the PNG image format and the GIF controversy in a Linux World article entitled Open source graphics with PNG.