That’s a WordPress site. Sweet ride.

Additional things that tells me: XHTML hardly matters. it’s not really used, that header could say HTML 4/STRICT for all it matters.

It’s using the jQuery JavaScript library, which is superb and worth learning. It’s the first JavaScript library not written by me of which I approve, which is arrogant praise indeed!

WordPress depends a lot on server-side PHP script. It’s structured as a kernel you don’t touch, and “themes”, which are a misnomer for “the whole HTML UI”. There are multiple add-on plug-ins and widgets; this site appears to be using plug-ins to generate the sidebars.

The theme it’s using is “graphene” (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/graphene).

If you learn WordPress from this project, you can help me with the Zone.

Go for it.

I took a class on XHTML 10 years ago and your example jogged my memory. Fun stuff.
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One of the reasons I asked was because I was approach by an in-law who works for the Oregon Wheat league. They ’re on their second (third?) web developer . They have been disappointed by both. Evidently service is the main issue. No call backs etc. They should be getting much better service for the thousands (six if I remember right) of dollars they’ve paid for the current site.

Anyway she asked if I could tweak the site for them. I declined because I’ve never done anything professionally and believe in the old adage “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. If I had kept up on things I might have considered it. In hindsight, I could have copied the code and worked on it off line. Duh.

I could see where there might be a problem taking over a site designed and administered by someone else but for the amount of money they were charged, I assume the Wheat league owns the copyright and can do whatever they want.

Maybe some studying is in order.

I’d estimate that about the same percentages as always use one of the three principal methodologies: WYSIWYG editor e.g. Dreamweaver; minor modifications to canned templates; raw code.

The first two generally hide the technology from you–the Luddite appeal–so it would seem like nothing’s changed.

The raw approach always evolves with the technology. I consider it a truism that the only way to write good code is from scratch, so I’m perpetually challenged to keep up with the technology in raw mode.

JavaScript’s not new, and the amount of it you see seems to fluctuate up and down over time. One big use of JavaScript is to overcome differences between browsers by writing different HTML/CSS for different situations, so the amount of JS you need at any given point in history depends a lot on how well the current browsers do conforming to standards. The general trend has been toward ever-better conformance, but there are nasty exceptions. I just got burned by an IE8 bug that makes it have trouble with Flash, after a couple of years of blissful relief from the usual problems with IE…and the fix was to go back to an old JavaScript compatibility library I thought I no longer needed.

The other use for JavaScript is page logic, and that’s currently on the upswing, after a period when people were putting logic more on the server. You see a lot of “REST”, the technique whereby JavaScript on a page talks politely to the server to send and receive data, instead of flushing the whole page down the toilet and loading a new one when data changes. The Zone uses this a lot, to display and store this comment form, the post form overlay, and so on. Later today I hope to install a new version with even more of it.

The XML is here to stay, but in a sense it’s always been here, since HTML is but a dialect of XML. The reason you’re seeing more XML in view source is that the latest browsers capitalize on the XMLishness of HTML by taking it to its logical conclusion: When using “XHTML”, the XML superset of HTML, there are no built-in tags; instead, there’s a default vocabulary of tag definitions in CSS for the traditional HTML vocabulary, that you can override or completely replace. If you’d rather that your paragraph tag be called “para” instead of “p”, you go right ahead and put this in your CSS:

para
{
  display:block;
  margin-top:6pt;
  margin-bottom:6pt;
  text-align:justify;
  font-family: Times;
  font-size: 10pt;
}

<para>and you’ve just defined your very own tag. Move over Marc Andressen!</para>

At first I was pretty excited by the coolness of the XHTML concept, but then I found that most of the time the basic HTML tag set still does the job, and that I need to define my own tags principally when I’m automatically generating a page from XML data, where the ability to style data tags in CSS means you can display XML data in a browser directly with only a CSS stylesheet. For example, you can display a XML-formatted RSS feed directly in a browser just by attaching CSS that defines how to display the feed.

XHTML is a fairly old technology that’s had a mild peak and is already being supplanted by the Latest Big Thing, HTML5. Its main claim to fame, near as I can tell, is that it has a <video> tag that displays media directly and–Steve Jobs argued–thereby obsoletes Flash. Steve was being more than a little disingenuous (hardly the first time), because video is no longer the main reason for using Flash. But Apple was obliged to try to kill Flash because, starting with Flash 10, it contains a hideously subversive feature: peer-to-peer audio and video. It would be the death of the cellphone industry, and Apple’s pet dinosaur AT&T. Cellphones became obsolete with Flash 10, and Apple and AT&T are desperately hoping nobody will notice.

Wrong as it is, they seem to be succeeding in killing off Flash, so at a minimum you’re probably going to need to learn how to use that video tag in future Web pages. When that happens I’ll upgrade the square-bracket codes we use here, like [[youtube]], to reflect whatever technology works. But time will march on etc etc.

And in conclusion, I would say, don’t let it boggle you, what you’re seeing isn’t all that strange and new from what you already know, and as always, there are short cuts and crutches that’ll help you keep up with the herd and not get picked off by the trailing wolves.

I’m going to try to learn how to use it.

Don’t know if it’s still practical to create websites with raw code. I admire people who can do it, though.