How did I make this site

How this site has been made

Start up

First of all read lots of stuff about HTML or better XHMTL: it is not difficult, yet it is the basis. Do not trust WYSIWYG editors; their code is quite dirty and unoptimized. BBEdit for example has specific functions to clean GoLive and Dreamweaver code. They are not that bad, you just have to pay attention to what they are doing. Frontpage is bad.
I bought and read Meyer's book about CSS. It's fundamental.
I forgot most people use Explorer. It does not completely support CSS 2 (and it does not even support correctly CSS 1), w3c recomends them and they make it easier work.
I bought BBEdit

BBEdit

BBEdit is the center of this site developement process. I did not want to use dyanamic scripting. PHP sucks and Python (mod_python / Nevow) could not be supported where I do want to publish my site.
So I chose to use scripts to generate content. This way when I do improve pieces of code or add new scripts, menu items and such, the whole site is updated.

I almost do not need dynamic languages. I'll have to probably add very short PHP scripts to implement counters and that kind of stuff, but nothing really crucial for the site itself.

Templates and include

I have just one template. All pages depend on it. It employs also some persistent includes and placeholders. Placeholders are similar to macros.
In the following code you won't see placeholders, as they have already been substituted from BBEdit.

main.tmpl (download)

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="it">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title></title>
    
    <link href="../styles/main.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <script src="../scripts/browsersniffer.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>        
    <script src="../scripts/iecheck.js"type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>
    </head>
<body onload="iecheck()">

    <div id="top">
    <!-- #bbinclude "top.html" -->
<!-- end bbinclude -->
    </div><!-- #bbinclude "menu.html" -->
        
<!-- end bbinclude -->
    <div id="main">
        #BODYTEXT#
    </div>
    <div id="sub">
<!-- #bbinclude "sub.html" -->

<!-- end bbinclude -->
    </div>
</body>
</html>