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Dan Harkless
Page created: November 20, 2002 [Site Map] |
Validated HTML 5 +
CSS Last modified: September 9, 2025 |
Welcome to my site! My pages are hierarchically organized. Here's a Site Map, which includes all my pages, complete with Created and Last Modified dates. It's automatically updated nightly by scripts I've written. (You'll also find a link to it in my page footers.)
I actually did my first web authoring way back in 1993, when NCSA Mosaic was becoming popular in the academic world, but that was done for my boss Carl Friehe (R.I.P.) at UCI. Actually, as of 2012, some of those pages still exist, though they were modified by others after I graduated from UCI in 1994. This Internet Archive copy of one of the pages as it existed in 1997 (the earliest archive they have of the wave.eng.uci.edu site) has my author line removed, but preserves my original wording where I called them "Mosaic pages" rather than "[World Wide] Web pages". It's also amusing that the graphs were only available in PostScript form, rather than a format like GIF viewable directly within the browser.
At some point a "People" directory was created on wave.eng.uci.edu so people
could put up personal web pages, but I didn't do anything with mine. Here's
the earliest copy that the Internet Archive has. As you can see, the
only thing there was a link to my page over at Unitech, the company I was working for in 1997. It was that year, when
I got access to some web space on their server, that I first put up a
personal page (one of the two guys at the company to do so). The first (and
still the main) "killer app" for my site was my Bookmarks page, which allowed me to access all my
links whether I was at work, at home, or (after I started using smartphones
in 2002) on the go. The first version of the page was simply an uploaded
copy of my Netscape
Navigator 3.0 bookmarks.html file (complete with its weird
use of definition-free definition
lists).
Pretty soon, though, I got up some of the other main categories that exist on my site today. Here's the October 1997 version of my site (actually the mirrored copy from my UCI account, which my boss had graciously allowed me to keep after leaving) from the Internet Archive. (Wow, what a garish background! Those were popular in the early days of the Web.)
After moving from Unitech to their ISP sister company SpeedGate in 1999, the URL of my page became
http://www.speed.net/~dan/.
In 2000, I wanted to register the "harkless.com" domain name and use that for my site, but it had been taken by a company trying to sell vanity domain email service, so I settled on "harkless.org".
Between 1997 and 2006, all my pages were written in HTML 3.2. It was the current version at the time I started the site, and I intentionally stuck to it, at first because desktop browsers' support for HTML 4 was extremely buggy and inconsistent (and there was still a significant population of pre-HTML-4 browsers), and later because the vast majority of browsers on cellphones and PDAs didn't support HTML 4 (or supported only small parts of the standard). Only as I write this in late 2006 are handheld browsers with decent HTML 4 / CSS support starting to become more common.
In 2006 I finally switched all my pages over to HTML 4.01 Transitional because ever-increasing spam to web-harvested addresses had forced me to start using JavaScript obfuscation of the mailto: links in the footers on the site, and HTML 3.2 doesn't include the JavaScript attribute I was using to allow users with non-JavaScript browsers (e.g. handheld browsers, or text-only browsers used by the blind), or those with JavaScript turned off for security reasons, to still send email via a web form.
Other than that use in the footer, though, I'll probably continue to use the HTML 3.2 subset of HTML 4 features for a while, since there are still a large number of browsers being used out there (now primarily on handhelds) without good HTML 4 support. I understand the philosophy of using HTML 4 or XHTML and purely using CSS for layout, but when you do that, pages look really terrible or are even unusable on HTML 3.2 or non-up-to-date HTML 4 browsers (and despite the claims of some, there's plenty of common layout that can be easily achieved with tables that's impossible to reproduce with CSS). Though I'd say I'm a content-over-form guy, aesthetics are important to me, and the HTML 3.2 featureset allows best-effort layout regardless of browser.
As of the mid-2010s, desktop or mobile browsers that don't support HTML 5 are thankfully becoming exceedingly rare, and I'm now using HTML 5 on new pages. As of the mid-2020s, although compatibility with HTML 4 in browsers remains good, I'm finally getting around to converting my HTML 4 pages to HTML 5.
In accordance with my desire for maximum accessibility, I avoid purely
graphical design, I always include ALT tags on images, I use
logical markup like <EM> and <VAR> rather than physical
markup like <I>, where appropriate, and I make sure
my HTML strictly meets the specification (you can click on the "Validated
HTML" and "CSS" links on the right side of my footers to verify). I code all
my HTML by hand, using XEmacs' HTML mode.
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Dan Harkless
Page created: November 20, 2002 [Site Map] |
Validated HTML 5 +
CSS Last modified: September 9, 2025 |