Before I moan and cry about the second snag I have hit in my second step, let me problaim a huge victory. If you run the main index page of this weblog through the validator you will see that it validates as XHTML 1.0 strict. Nate helped me get there.

For those just joining, step two of my redesign was to re-organize my templates to reflect my site’s full functionality and to mark up the content and elements semantically and according to web standards (of which I am largely ignorant). Step one of the redesign was to trash my style sheets.

Thanks to some amazing tools and some expert help from Nate, the validation thing is going much better than it was before. I ran my newly-stripped and marked-up template output through the validator to be greeted by 187 cheering errors. I almost said “forget it,” but Nate urged me to fix the errors one at a time and to plug away at it. It worked! This is the first time I’ve ever actually validated anything I’ve worked on before, despite the fact that I was a web developer back in the HTML 4.x days.

The next step is to make changes to each of my templates so that all of the output validates and the navigation and functionality are in place. Basically, I want to make the site run exactly as planned BEFORE I apply any style (formatting) to the content.

I’m also taking advantage of the opportunity to reorganize my content and to transfer many content management features into Movable Type, the weblogging tool I use. Chunked-up bits that are common throughout the site will be included into files via MT’s template modules feature, and I will be migrating to the PHP scripting language to handle dynamic elements of this site. How I plan to maintain my link integrity and not destroy the world remains to be seen.

I’m also going to implement real-time stock tickers, scrolling news items, an interactive “push” technology component and lots and lots of superfluous Flash and animated .GIF files. I hope you like it!

But back to my “snag.” Apparently, all of the nifty JavaScript stuff I’ve been relying on causes the Validator to hack up bloody dust, so I’ve got to figure out a way around that. Such is my next challenge.