I’ve been reading A List Apart since i woke up (two hours now, whoa) and started wondering again how a proper website should work. The three main fields: valid markup of the data, accessibility of the data and a nice design. Except for accessibility (which is a pain for me, because i’m not familiar with it) these are not too much trouble–at least in themselves. But they need to be put together…

Techniques worth considering: (at first) SVG, MathML, CSS @font-face. SVG is strange for me, because it’s XML markup of an image. Wikipedia has a couple of SVG pics, but i don’t really like them. The reason is simple: it takes ages to render a world map from SVG. On the one hand then, it’s small, because it’s just text, but on the other hand, it’s huge, because it burdens the user’s computer. Not to mention marking it up by hand seems to be troublesome (GIMP can’t save to SVG apparently, at least i couldn’t find it at first blick), and i can do well with PNG’s and JPG’s so far. For MathML: Firefox renders it correctly (been lazy to check on other browsers), so the only thing i’d leave it out is that i don’t need it. @font-face is very useful, for i could include my own fonts into the page with it, it seems to be supported (who cares about IE6 anymore), there’s only one issue with it: speed. I don’t mean rendering, that’s not a problem i think, but download. Since my pages are in multiple scripts, i need UTF8. And a more or less complete Unicode font is around 15 megs (just for japanese consider the roughly 3000 characters…) which takes time to download, even with a very fast connection. May be a short time, but it’s still annoying. The solution could be a flash-like “loading” animation with JavaScript, but this is still subject of consideration for now.

Furthermore, i’m considering doing the blog output in XML-XSLT-XHTML, since i’m (once again) reconsidering the working of the engine, as i think i finally grasped how i should work with OOP properly.