More on web development

Just saw an interesting book at Clementi Bookstore today.

Open Source .NET Development : Programming with NAnt, NUnit, NDoc, and More by Brian Nantz

Looks like a good book that I'll pick up next time, or borrow it from the library. Reasonally priced too.

More about my life:
Today's quite a tiring day. I'm sick again. Down with the big bug flu. I went to meet SIG^2 guys today to discuss some collaborations with them and SGDN. I guess the meeting went well. Hope everything works out fine.

I hope I recover from this flu soon. The medicine's making me drowsy and tired so I can't really blog anything today.

Web Development:
Read 1/4 of "Designing with Web Standards" today, still reading the 1st part of the book where they talk about the benefits and revolution of web standards, in the more business sense. That part is more for managers and such, but I guess I'll just breeze through it to get a rough idea on the Web and its legacy.

Quite interesting discussions on how horrible web browsers were back in the early days. That's actually one of the reasons why I didn't hop on to the web development at that time, because it was just simply too tedious and too many code versions to write for different browsers.

But after reading a few chapters from the book, I'm starting to think that web development is really ready for me to take on, with it's strict coding, and the trinity of web standards and development, plainly put, Structure(data), Presentation(layout) and Behaviour(scripting). I think it's quite matured enough to start picking up web development seriously.

A first impression review on the book is that it really gives you the lee-way to choose what and how you want to code your html, and does not enforce you to only 1 strict possible way of doing it, but gives you a variety of options to choose from. It also has a quite open view on web standards, and it isn't really an evangelist book that non-sensically press down dogmas and crazed purist thoughts on CSS and XHTML seperations. I like it's open approach that allows you freedom of choice, but provides you with alternatives too. I'll most probably stick to the strictness, coming from a C++ background.

Previously in 1996 when I wanted to go into web development, it was the hottest thing back then, I had alot of trouble understanding the loosely structured tags and inconsistencies of codes between browsers, and lots of browser checking codes, which basically pissed me off, so much that I threw a HTML book out of the window, literally. But with the XHTML standards that's out now, and every browser is almost standardized to follow the web standards, I feel it's finally time to come out my shell and plunge into the web development.

I'm still currently using tables to style my layout for my website, but after I'm finished with this book, trust me, I'll start recoding everything from scratch to support the wonderful strictness of XHTML. Furthermore, I'll write more about control development with XHTML STRICT DOM. Look forward to it.

Cheerios.