The past week and a half, I have been preoccupied with upgrading and redesigning my website at www.stardel.com, including my weblog there. Once I set my weblog to be standards compliant using HTML 4.01 and Cascading Style Sheets, I decided to go back and redo my website as well. This was a tedious job, because I had bits and pieces of non-compliant HTML written over the course of eight or nine years. To find all of it, I wrote a Perl script that validated each page using the W3C validator. Then I had to interpret the error messages and warnings from the validator. I also had to fix various scripts that I use to maintain and generate various files from templates, and that took a while as well.
In the process, I broke a few things, like my RSS feed and my comments system, and had to fix them. And, I continually had to struggle against the temptation to just play with my Cascading Style Sheets, since they were so much more entertaining than retagging old html files.
However, it is done now, and everything validates. I even wrote a script that I can run each day against recent files to make sure that no errors can creep back in. I feel a warm little glow as the program reports each updated file as valid.
I’ve learned a lot from what started as an intellectual exercise. This is something I had been wanting to do for a long time, but had been putting off because I knew it would take a lot of time.