Afterwit: My old web pages are so poorly designed
September 8th, 2006
Finally I’ve done the migration of my web site (kind of). My original intention was to convert all non-blog articles on my site to WordPress Posts. However, I gave up the idea after some pilot runs, and used direct hyperlinks instead. There are some reasons behind the scence and I think I’d better stay away from these points if I’d create any web pages ever again:
- Not using Unicode: There are two consequences that one did not use Unicode to write the web page. First, there will be a lot of redundant span tags like lang=”zh-tw” which can be totally avoided by using Unicode. The other reason is that many tools claimed to support i18n in the way of supporting Unicode only.
- Embed formatting info in HTML: For example, the use of font face=”courier” to format code segments will cause a lot of troubles once you link a CSS stylesheet with this HTML file. The trend now is to seperate contents from formattings so that when we change the outlook of a web site, we don’t need to change its contents.
- Using widgets in HTML: FrontPage bots are so old and almost going to extinct. They also create a lot of trouble when you move pages to different locations.
However, these points are pure afterwits. At the time that I created those old web pages, FrontPage-edited pages looked good enough for a personal web site. Not to mention when MS developers worked on FrontPage XP, there was literally no usable CSS yet …