I had a problem with my server computer the last couple of days; apparently because of a failed update. In the meantime I tidied up the html on this blog – I was thinking there was something wrong with it because bluefish editor incorrectly highlights some of the syntax. SeaMonkey has a link to an html validator. It found a few errors, but these were not the reason for bluefish’s wrong syntax highlighting, which continues, though all the code now validates.
Besides valid code, I have some other wishes. I want the page to be light and quick to load, so I will keep the image sizes trimmed, and maybe allow a full column width image only in the lead article. I have also split up the articles, so that older ones go to an archive page, rather than just to the WordPress archive.
Also in the name of readability, I have moved the styles into a style sheet. I have also separated the blog from the “about” pages.
Another wish is to write html that it is easy to read, since I spend so much time in the editor. Most html tags are short and non-distracting. Image tags and hyperlinks seem to be the main problem. So, in order to make the html source easier to read, I have decided to lump all the hyperlinks together at the end, in the manner of Wikipedia. In the post itself, I will simply use page anchors, which are shorter and less distracting.
I got the idea of placing hyperlinks at the end from a blog post called “The Art of Plain Text” [1] in which the writer uses an even more minimalistic blogging style than this one. In place of paragraphs, he uses the “pre” html tag*. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, because his site is hard to read on phones.
I am consciously using quotes here, rather than escape characters, because they too make the html really hard to read. Links of the day
- Plain text
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/the-art-of-plain-text.html
DuckDuckGo Onion Search for Firefox https://www.netmeister.org/blog/ddg-tor.html
Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from “a million years to 30 minutes,” says Nobel laureate – Big Think https://bigthink.com/the-present/laser-nuclear-waste/