About this site

This whole site at http://www.di-mgt.com.au was created entirely in "raw" HTML by David Ireland using UltraEdit-32 and Metapad text editors.

The CGI scripts were written in Perl and some security-related features were written in ANSI C. Testing was carried out using MS VC++5, Cygwin and Win32 Perl from ActiveState. The graphics were created using Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6, or were downloaded from freeware sites such as BigNoseBird - you can guess which are which, can't you?

The site is hosted by Philex Enterprises.

Upgrading to XHTML

August 2004: After a clamouring demand from, er, nobody, we have started the laborious process of upgrading our pages from table-driven HTML to fully-compliant XHTML (well, transitional anyway) using CSS stylesheets. We are indebted to the guys at ZyTrax for their fantastic pages describing how they went through the process to convert to W3C CSS2 and their very clear advice on how to do it.

Before we found ZyTrax, we got a bit uncomfortable about various well-intentioned sites with all their `tricks' to get around the unavoidable fact that if you publish using valid CSS2 and strict XHTML as you are meant to, your pages will be unreadable on a lot of popular browsers. We've tested the new pages on IE6, Firefox, Mozilla 1.1, Opera 7.52, Netscape 4, and even Lynx.

Converting HTML files to XHTML

Use this Perl script to convert an existing compliant HTML file into an XHTML one. It does almost all of the changes you need to do and adds the Transitional DOCTYPE. You'll still need to fix up missing closing tags like </p> or </li>.

No nasties here

There are no Java applets, Flash gizmos, Megabyte video downloads, or other nasties anywhere on this site. We don't use cookies, except for our client private login pages, and even then the pages work with cookies disabled. A few pages might use a few JavaScript tricks, but none rely on it. Otherwise everything else is just plain HTML.

Style sheets and Netscape 4

We make extensive use of CSS style sheets that have been thoroughly checked using both the Web Design Group CSS Check and the W3C CSS Validation Service. Unfortunately, these don't work properly on Netscape 4 browsers due to a bug in NS4 - if you use HTML tables with style sheets it turns everything black! Fortunately Netscape has another bug that can be used to turn off style sheets without using JavaScript (add the attribute media="all" to the stylesheet LINK tag). This latter bug is definitely a "feature". Apologies to any Netscape 4 users (both of you).

Any comments, feedback, questions to The Webmaster.