About this site
Software
This is the personal archive of Matt Sparks. It is powered by the Apache Web Server and is written in Perl, running on the Linux operating system with a 2.6 kernel.
Content
Most of the content here is an original creation of the author of this site. Some notable exceptions include the Gallery, the indexer used by FDC Laboratories, and the original layout and CSS stylesheet.
All original pages are composed in emacs and jEdit by hand on Linux. No WYSIWYG editors are used here. Almost all of the standard pages use an internal formatting scheme similar to the syntax of Juerd's MetaMarkup.
Examples:
- [http://google.com|Google, a search engine]
- Google, a search engine (notice also: external links have an image beside them)
- [site]
- site
- {b:Bold} {u:Underline} {tt:foo}
- Bold Underline foo
- {b:{u:embedded bold and underline text} with bold {i:italic}} text
- embedded bold and underline text with bold italic text
Paragraphs are determined automatically based on newlines in the content files, and tagged appropriately. The site is controlled by a single core script that determines which page is to be viewed, loads the appropriate classes and performs general maintenance, then formats and loads the page. The time listed at the bottom of every page is the duration of page generation.
Validation
Most, or all, content validates to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional W3C specification. And, although it validates as XHTML 1.0, this site is sent as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml. The reason for this is simple: XHTML (in its "proper" use) is simply not well supported (in fact, IE will fail to display anything). Read more about this problem in David Hammond's article. Regardless, it is imperative that viewers of this site use a standards-compliant web browser such as Opera or Firefox. Internet Explorer does not follow web standards and while this site will appear nearly identical on any standards-compliant browser, IE will totally fail at rendering it due to this website's heavy use of CSS.
No WWW
quadpoint.org is a no-www Class B. All traffic to "www.quadpoint.org" will be silently redirected to "quadpoint.org", without the "www". Information for this idea is available on the no-www.org website.
If you are a webmaster, make sure your site(s) are available on the bare domain (domain.com), as well as on www.domain.com.