I referenced this in a post from a few months ago, but never bothered to expound on it. You cannot use cascading style sheets (CSS) to create headers, footers or menus that will be re-used on all of your pages. Instead, you have to use server-side includes (SSI).

There are a handful of ways to use SSI, and they are available in most all of the Web development languages used today. Although I think the use of repeating headers and footers is somewhat outdated, opting more for using templates that dynamically include your content, I’m going to try to teach you a few ways to include your headers, footers and/or menus on all of your pages.

I found out something interesting about the W3C validator services yesterday while working on some code. I wanted to find a way to dynamically validate my pages, so that I didn’t put a validity notice on the page if it wasn’t valid.

While validating one of my pages, I decided to check the response headers returned by the W3C validator engine, just on a whim, to see if there was anything in there that might tell me whether or not my page was valid.

What do you know? Not only is it spelled out in very plain English, the header also tells you how many errors and warnings were returned by the engine if the page wasn’t valid.

This will be my second review of popular Linux distributions. This time, I will be taking a look at Mandriva 2008.1.

Mandriva is a distribution that is built with KDE as its main desktop environment. This particular version comes packaged with KDE 3.

Google officially released the first beta version of their browser today. The browser is called Chrome, and is intended to go head-to-head with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (then again, what browser hasn’t been released with that goal in mind?).

I have downloaded and installed Chrome on my Vista machine at home, and am writing this post from within Chrome right now. I have to say that, at first glance, I am extremely impressed at how little screen real estate the browser’s window takes up. If all browsers were to take a note from Google’s browser, visitors’ screen resolutions might actually start to mean something.

Mona found this video and I thought it was worth sharing. It’s so true. They left out one part – that’s designers taking too long and forcing the development time to be cut to meet the deadline. Enjoy!

Periodically, I plan to review various Linux distributions. At this point, I have five different Linux distributions installed through VirtualBox on my computer at home, and will be trying to write a review of each when I feel I’ve used it enough to comment on it.

I will begin the series by reviewing OpenSuSE 11.0. I have been using SuSE since 9.1 was released, and have always enjoyed it. OpenSuSE 11.0 brings quite a few nice updates (discussed in a previous post) from the previous versions. However, I’m not really going to discuss the differences between 11.0 and previous versions, as I couldn’t do the same for other distributions. Instead, I will only be reviewing 11.0 as though I am a new user.

Target recently settled a lawsuit for $6 million after being sued by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB). The NFB sued the mega retailer because their Web site was not accessible enough.

While I don’t expect all of us to be sued by advocacy groups, this example does give each of us another reason to begin pushing harder for concrete accessibility guidelines, and to continue working toward making our own Web sites accessible for disabled users.

For those of us in the public sector, accessibility is even more important, as we are actually governed by the SEC 508 guidelines. However, even those in the private sector, as evidenced by this lawsuit, should watch their backs and get with the times.

While there are no real guidelines for accessibility in the private sector, the SEC 508 guidelines and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are certainly still good things to strive toward.

For those of you that use Linux, especially those that use a Gnome-flavored distribution, you should be familiar with Evolution; the greatest e-mail client I’ve ever used. For the rest of the world, I want to share this amazing application.

Though there is a version of Evolution available for Windows, I have not yet used it, so all of my comments in this article will be based on the Linux version. I cannot say for sure whether or not the Windows port has the same features, but I am hoping that it does.

I’m curious what your thoughts are on this subject. As I posted a few weeks (or possibly months) ago, I have joined the Facebook community, and am actually enjoying it quite a bit. My question to the world is: Is Facebook poised to kill Classmates? If not, why not? If so, why hasn’t it happened, yet?

Over the next few weeks or months, I intend to review some of the more popular Linux distributions. In order to do so, though, I feel I need to begin by offering a little bit of background into some of the more integral parts of Linux. Throughout my reviews, I will most likely make some reference to some of these items and the way a distribution behaves with a default installation. However, things like the desktop environment (which is what I’m going to focus on in this post) are almost always completely interchangeable between distributions, and should only be considered pros and cons of a distribution when discussing the default behavior of that distro.