I had several goals in mind in building new sites. The most obvious goals, of course, were to update the content of the main site, and to split off my work-related information to a separate site, and to improve the look of the site. But I had some other goals as well.

• Use XHTML
• Use CSS
• Use XML for Content
• Use XSL to prepare (X)HTML
• Create a separate version of the site in basic HTML for older browsers

To summarize: I wanted to update my site to use the latest "web standards" from the W3C, an organization that develops new standards for Internet-based computing. I also wanted to pull the content (writing) out of HTML, so that first, I could have different versions of the site (for newer and older browsers), and second, so that I could more easily maintain different sections of the site, and add new content, without having to muck around with HTML.

The rest of this topic talks about what I accomplished, and how, and the problems I faced in getting it all to work.

Was the effort worth it? Not sure yet. In principle, it should save time when I need to make adjustments to the layout/presentation, and should also allow me to add new content quickly. For example, I would like to be able to scribble up a quick note when I see an interesting site or news story and drop it on the site relatively quickly. By pushing this out the XML, I don't have to search for the news.html page, find the <table> used to format the contents, copy-and-paste, etc. Time will tell if this is really useful or not. But since I had to rewrite the content anyway, it seems like a good bet with only a little extra effort.