Any of you monkeys want a banana?

There seems to be (at least) one absolute rule when it comes to building and maintaining a web site....it's a never-ending job, especially when new techniques are added that interact with old content. I've been slowly going through the pages and incorporating the style sheets I began creating earlier this year. CSS is a great help when building web pages...if you build web sites, you should be using CSS. It's too bad there isn't more consistent support in the current browsers, but that should get better as time passes. It's actually pretty good right now and, sad to say, for some things, IE6 supports the CSS standards better than Mozilla. For example, I've tried to create a style that sets my logo as the header background. In IE6, it works just fine. In Mozilla, I have so far been unable to get it to display the graphic. There's a trick to it I'm missing, because numerous sites out there do this successfully. I'll eventually figure it out, I suppose.

Another issue is converting entries from a database into a RSS feed. Well-formed XML demands that all tags be properly closed, or the parser will fail, and complain bitterly about some malformed something or other. I've been working on a feed for my weblog, and found that the creation of the xml document would not complete normally, because some of the tags imbedded in the text (to display pictures, offer hyperlinks, etc) weren't properly closed. The two main culprits were the line break and the image tags. Once I closed them properly (and removed a few characters the parser didn't like) the xml file could be created. Closing the line break means using < br /> instead of < br >, and a properly closed img tag has /> at the closing bracket. I'll be interested in finding whether the weblog loads faster using the rss feed or pulling from the database.