The West Central Wisconsin Community Webring (WCWCW) is designed to serve the People, the Land itself, Local Businesses and Institutions of our area. Our commitment is to the service of this largely rural and small town area in the beautiful driftless region our state. We are determined to make the WCWCW a comprehensive and usable site. Within the WCWCW you will find Feature articles, Community Events and Announcements, Web Pages and Links from the community, Member Listings, News, Bulletin Boards and WCWCW Forums (free!) as well as up-to date weather information geared toward West Central Wisconsin. Need a website? Try the WCWCW Web Hosting Service. Want to talk 'real-time' with others...try WCWCW Chat!

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The above validation from the W3C applies only to this page and most others on this site, except scripted pages and certain user's directories. After making two websites completely XHTML compliant, I had earlier made some disparaging remarks here about the W3C. I have learned a few tricks since then, especially the W3C insistence on closed tags (you can't open one set of tags inside another without first closing the initial instance), order of closing and entering them, etc. There are still reservations I have about the whole XHTML protocol and its difference from HTML. Why and how there are some things allowed and other things not, and the who and why's in these decisions. While standards compliance seems to be moving in general in the right direction and amounts largely to just good coding, certain "insistencies" seem dubious and the process can be tedious and maddening especially when your website began 12 years ago. This is not Zen simplicity and the errors can seem incongruous and without any real help in deciphering them. I am not sure who really benefits from separating formatting from content via CSS, there ends up being just as much code in a different place and different language as in "old fashioned" coding and it tends to define one standard template that is difficult to deviate from and makes for less flexibility, fluidity, and variety of overall design.

Consider one of our pictorial features, Wisconsin's Living History--A genealogical snapshot. Its total size is around 915KB. The amount of code in the page source, including the plain text search engines generally use in indexing and the code used in formatting is about 14.3KB. If I take the displayed text, without the code, it is around 7.87KB in notepad. The savings of the code used in formatting the textual content is only 6.43KB, less than 0.68% of that page. So to every browser that is nothing saved that wouldn't be saved anyway in your cache. Going to a "state of the art" HTML5 (which is the next move after XHTML though it is not even at the time of this writing an official standard) CMS like WordPress, the main style sheet is 19KB--and this instance is not all that complex of a style format. The whole premise behind much of the standards compliance push seems off on a tangent of its own and not exactly what I would call creating standardized coding that is non-proprietary and accessible to all modern browsers and users. The "vision of One Web" of W3C.

The other big push is to merge html with xml. I ask why? Is it to appease the plethora of application devices that are currently the latest market place rage? I believe it is the application designers job to figure out how to render web pages not website developers and designers to play the technological market place for them--or those who create "standards". Written in 2012.