[ale] web page creation app

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On Fri 2008-05-30 16:55:21 -0400, Paul Cartwright wrote:

> I don't like pain, but I will try something that includes CSS, 

CSS isn't pain -- CSS is bliss, and static web sites *without* CSS are
agony!  You've built a simple, well-structured static web site with a
dozen pages, and 20 photos, and suddenly you decide that you want all
the image captions to be on a blue background, dammit, not a white
one?  One small change in your CSS stylesheet and you're done for the
whole site, if you've already cleanly separated your form from your
content.

Want to move that navigation bar from the left side to the right side
of every page?  Also, a simple change with CSS.

> I'm not sure javascript is necessary..

I'm not convinced learning javascript is necessary either.  There's
enough lingering cross-browser incompatibility and nonsense to make it
so that if you want to do anything remotely fun with javascript, you
should really pick one of the better frameworks (scriptaculous,
jquery, etc -- don't kill me for not listing your favorite one!) and
learn that instead, since they abstract away a lot of the nastiness.

Oh, and HTML *has* changed in the last 10 years.  XHTML 1.0 is
actually a nice incremental improvement over HTML 4.  If you're a
reference geek, or the kind of person who likes man pages (i can't
imagine how you'd last 20 years in UN*X if you seriously disliked man
pages), the W3C's references [0] are quite good.  And it's also worth
learning about the free validity-checking tools [1] to make sure that
your code is gonna be parsed the way you intend it by all the funky
browsers out there.

As to whether static sites or CMS's are the KISS approach:

With a CMS or similar webapp, you'll have something nice to show much
much sooner than with a static site.  So it's simpler that way.  But
unless your web host is really good about maintaining the webapp
you've installed for you, you've just taken on the job of learning how
to maintain and upgrade a new-fangled web application.  Unfortunately,
this is a decidedly non-trivial task, and a difficult one to practice
without screwing up your own site (unless you're already playing
around with your own servers at home, as many folks on this list
probably are).

A static site simply cannot get compromised in the vast majority of
ways that a webapp can (and will!) be compromised.  If you don't know
(and don't want to know) about XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, session
hijacking, comment spam filtering, etc, and you don't have someone
looking out for that stuff for you, you might want to stick with
maintaining static pages.  Especially if you are already comfortable
with transferring your static site around the 'net.

Regards,

       --dkg

[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/html/
    http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS/
[1] https://support.mayfirst.org/wiki/web_validation
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