The domain name madboa.com is an homage to a nickname I had when I was a counselor at
Arrowhead Lutheran Camp in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Camp counseling was a large part of my early adulthood, and I’d be a lesser person without my experience at Arrowhead and
Camp Omega. When I decided to apply for a personal domain, the choice
for a name was a no-brainer.
Part of the fun of having my own web site is it provides me the opportunity to choose the technological tools I want to use to create and maintain it.
All the tools listed below are Free software. I’ve capitalized “Free” because it means more than $0.00. It means that I can freely access, alter, and redistribute the original source code. It also means that I’m not beholden to any company for the continued maintenance of my software.
DocBook. Most of the HTML-formatted pages on this site are maintained as DocBook files. Granted, working in DocBook is not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s overkill for the casual web developer. It really shines, however, in cases where you want to do your markup according to what something means instead of what it should look like. Norm Walsh is the prime mover behind DocBook and he’s published two indespensible tools for working with it: DocBook: the Definitive Guide and the DocBook XSL Stylesheets.
libxml2 and libxslt. Daniel Veillard is a wizard. His libxml2 and libxslt libraries and toolsets bring native-compiled speed to toolsets that typically have been implemented in Java. His tools provide speedy validation, parsing, and transformation of XML content files.
GNU emacs. emacs is as quirky, loveable, and frustrating as its creator, the inimitable Richard Stallman. In psgml mode, however, it’s nothing short of wonderful. I love working with XML documents in emacs. It knows how to parse a DTD and insert tags in their appropriate context. Other XML editors come and go, but emacs will always get the job done.
Perl. Perl is so flexible and multi-faceted that it’s easy to forget how easy it makes so many tasks. Larry Wall’s brainchild sets the bar for scripting languages. It also sets the standard for community involvement: CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is home to a myriad of incredibly useful modules for everything from web programming to playing poker.
HTML Tidy. Originally developed by Dave Raggett, tidy is a great tool for ensuring that your HTML validates according to the DTD of your choice. The wealth of output options ensures that you never have to be embarrassed when people start poking around your HTML code.
Nearly all the HTML pages on this site come with a alternative stylesheet that’s suitable for printing. If you’re using a web browser that’s capable of automatically recognizing it, and you want to print any of the pages you find here, you might find it helpful. In Firefox, for example, navigate your way to → and choose the option.
The little W3C icons located at the bottom of nearly all of this site’s pages indicate that I try to adhere to accepted HTML and CSS standards before publishing on the public Internet.
Adhering to standards is not a recipe for squelching creativity. Instead, it frees the Internet community to be more creative.
Non-standard pages waste time. The people who write the wonderful browsers we use are forced to devote thousands of hours writing the code necessary for parsing all the bad HTML. Webmasters have to spend a similar amount of their time making sure that their HTML works with all those browsers.
Non-standard pages limit community. So-called HTML created with one web-design tool is incompatible with other tools, hindering collaborative efforts. Worse, it can lead authors into a nasty situation where they’re completely locked into their vendor’s products. Bad HTML might render fine in some browsers, while not at all in others.
Standards-based tools and code do just the opposite: they save time and widen community. Hmm. Free time and broader community? That sounds like a recipe for creativity to me!