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The making of slantOctober 30th 1999.Well, slant is predominantly crafted on an Amiga computer, with most of the main text initially written in a word-processor so it can be easily spell checked. From here it's copied to a simple text processor and extra HTML tags added. However, to add all the tags by hand and then put it up on the web would be far too easy. No, I preprocess my files using a tool called hsc (HTML Sucks Completely). Amongst other things, this can check that the links on my pages are valid (and at least warn me if they are not). It also does an HTML check which helps me to produce some of the most error free HTML around. The other advantage is that I can create includes which makes changing something like the left hand side of all the article pages a whole lot easier. I just change it on one template and reprecompile. Being something of a standards supporter, I also run my pages through the W3 HTML Validator. I try to write HTML to comply to the HTML 4 Transitional standard, so it should be readable on nearly all browsers. Sadly it would be a lie to say that all my pages are syntax perfect. Thanks to its Javascript, the front page will not validate as correct HTML but every other page should. This site also uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to control the font which is displayed. This cuts out the font tags in the main HTML and allows me to change the font of the site by changing a single file. The stylesheet has also been run through a validator. Unfortunately, there is a bug in Netscape 4's CSS support that means the small text menu at the bottom of the page will appear in Netscape's default font... Nearly all the GIFs have been hand drawn and optimised in PPaint [an Amiga paint package]. Tools
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