About this site

This whole site at http://www.di-mgt.com.au was created entirely in "raw" HTML by David Ireland using a text editor.

The CGI scripts are written in Perl and some security-related features are written in ANSI C. The graphics were created using Jasc Paint Shop Pro, 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. We have used Philex since 1999.

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.

Er, actually, ...

OK, so now we do actually use some Javascript and even first-party cookies

MathJax: We make use of the JavaScript utility MathJax to display mathematics on some pages. At the moment (2013) this appears to be free and even lets you link to their server to display the high-quality graphics.
jqPlot: We use the excellent Javascript jqPlot plotting and charting plugin to create graphs for our chi-square and binomial distribution statistics calculators.
PHP scripts: Some PHP scripts require first-party cookies to be accepted. Most sites like Facebook and gmail require this these days, so it's no big deal. These cookies are only used for the duration of the session and don't track.

Text Editor

March 2013: We used to use the UltraEdit text editor, which we've used for thirteen years and for which were quite happy to pay the licence and upgrade fees. But the latest versions after v16 are bloated with unnecessary features, take too long to load, keep crashing, and have some nasty "phone-home" type of licensing which is no doubt designed to avoid piracy but just means we stop using it.

So now we recommend the free Notepad++, which we have found is an excellent text editor that provides all the features we need without the bloat and invasive phone-home features of UltraEdit.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Howard Yeend at www.puremango.co.uk for his freeCap PHP CAPTCHA script, last seen here. It's much better than that awful reCAPTCHA stuff with their unreadable words.
Thanks to David Kim for his KSearch website search engine (formerly at www.kscripts.com, sadly no more) for a great site search engine that works brilliantly.

Upgrading to (X)HTML - Part 1

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 IE8, 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>.

Upgrading to (X)HTML - Part 2

January 2009: Back in 2004 it looked like XHTML was the way to go. After all, it had an "X" in it, so it must be cool. However, at this time, it is actually more worthwhile to create pages in Strict HTML 4.01 than in XHTML Transitional. W3C is now looking at HTML 5. XHTML may never take off.

XHTML is over-rated

For the "X" part of XHTML to work properly you need two things to happen:

Your web host server must serve up XHTML documents as proper XML, not text/html.
Your browser must be capable of handing true XHTML documents.

Well, number 1 doesn't happen unless you manage your own server and number 2 never happens at all for any popular browser, so your XHTML document is almost certainly going to be interpreted as HTML. Worse, if it actually were interpreted as pure XHTML and there was any error whatsoever, no matter how slight, you'd just get a big **ERROR** message across your screen. Oh, and all those convenient HTML entities like   are invalid in XHTML. And older browsers will get upset if you include a <?xml version="1.0"?> declaration. So concentrate on getting your HTML right and make sure you conform to the latest HTML Strict specification. And once you've done that, it's a trivial exercise to convert to XHTML, should that ever become really useful to do.

We agree entirely with Peter-Paul Koch and his opinion to "X It Off Your List" and with Zytrak's more recent comments XHTML vs HTML.

Anyway, as of January 2009, we will be making all our updated pages in Strict HTML 4.01. So far, all our tests with Firefox, MSIE, Opera and Lynx give us perfect results. The new pages even work on my wife's BlackBerry. You can send flames on this topic to the email contact below. For a more detailed rant, see our page XML is xhite.

Contact

To contact us please send us a message

This page last updated 20 May 2013