About Dystopiad.com


Lon Allen is a free-lancer and proprietor of Dystopiad.com - a not-for-profit, not-by-choice, rant-zone site which also uses an XHTML/CSS-based layout in accordance with W3C standards.

Over the last year, Dystopiad has provided a vehicle for me to learn and practice coding. Whenever I learn something new or a slightly different way of doing things, I try to incorporate it into the site.

As for the content - well, I couldn't just have a bunch of empty divs laying around, now, could I? Anyway, the ideas presented here - though certainly not Pulitzer Prize material, (or even new or even good for that matter), reasonably reflect my position on a number of issues, so I'll make no apologies there.

Apart from what's on this site, I've also written a few articles on webcoding which you can read by clicking on any of the article links that follow.

Again, thanks for visiting and drop by again, soon!


Webcoding Articles
Validating JavaScript XHTML Strict

I know very little about JavaScript - apart from the non-validating pages, slow-loading times, evil pop-ups, malicious code and so on - just enough to realize I should probably use it sparingly, or not at all. At any rate, whenever I use a script for newsfeeds, or to achieve an effect of some sort, it usually has errors. Fortunately, most of the time it looks worse than it is. The following is the JavaScript code for a newsfeed with 13 errors and 15 warnings in it; although the first 2 errors are the only ones that matter in this case:

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Validating Forms XHTML Strict

Forms are an essential and vital part of any good website. Problem is, if you're using someone else's script, it most probably comes complete with errors which, if you're coding XHTML Strict and want your page to validate, can be both a nuisance and time-consuming. Conversely, if you're doing your own forms, a couple of tips could save cleaning up the mess later.

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Optimizing Style Sheets with CSS Shorthand

Separating style from content using CSS style sheets is great for cutting down load times for web pages; but you can reduce it even more by optimizing your CSS using a little shorthand for borders, padding, margins, fonts, and so on. Say, for example, if you're styling a navigation bar it could end up looking something like this (as some of mine have!):

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Validating Flash XHTML Strict

Flash applications of one sort or another are an integral part of most websites these days and while they may look pretty, they rarely validate XHTML Strict. This is frustrating if you want a cool-looking website that's also standards-compliant. So, I thought it might be useful to demonstrate by example how to clean up a Flash application and dress it up in xhtml finery for validation - a 'flashectomy', of sorts. If not, one can always play the games.

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