The Joy of HTML

Or more precisely the joy of xhtml, Now I had a website back in the mid nineties. it is long defunct though I still have the files, having found them on an old drive I rehabilitated recently. More specifically I am using “HTML4 for Dummies” by Ed Tittel and Stephen Nelson Jame and also “HTML, XHTML & CSS” by Ed Tittel and Jeff Noble. The site is for my brothers mountaineering web site; He manages most of his activities through face book and email.
So he wanted a simple page, with very little configuration, allowing contact but protecting his email from spam harvesters. The page is pure HTML and CSS for layout. So far, we are still tweaking it. it looks good on IE8 and Firefox. I still need to check on it in Safari on the iphone and the Palm Pre.
To hide the mail I used the catchpa service provided by Google called MailHide. By default this produces an email address that looks like “nam…@domain.com” with the ellipsis providing the link. Clicking on the link opens a pop up window that has the captcha and solving this reveals the email as an embedded mailto: link.  Since we did not like this we edited the generated code to replace the ellipsis with an image and removed the remaining original text of the email address.
The other problem, I have is with the Facebook like button. Here I was getting a popup window with error and nothing else much, no error message or anything of help. Some Googling later got me to this blog entry which I hope will solve the issue. I have to test that part yet.
Turns out that the problem (may have been blindness on my part since I did not see the textbox to enter the url for the site hosting the like button. It all seems to be working now. Firefox allows one to see who has liked the site but IE8 does not.