Site Technologies
The project to develop this site set out deliberately to be "low tech". The hard work has gone into the site design and architecture. As such, the site is actually put together using a minimum of tools and specifications.Page creation uses the W3C XHTML specification: this ensures that it is both cleanly written HTML, and is future-compatible, and accessible to different user agents, including for the visually impaired.
Style sheets associated with the pages, use a limited subset of the W3C CCS Level 1 specification.
In applying the unique identifier scheme that I use, I rely on a couple of server-side configurations. Links point to, for example "/uid/0001". This is actually a directory rather than a filename, and is captured in two ways by the server.
Firstly, it attempts to provide language content negotiation: as some "objects" are available in different languages, the server will firstly attempt to match the language settings in the user's browser. If there is a match, the html page of that language will be sent to the user.
Secondly, or if no language match is made, the server will load the default index.htm page. This actually contains the extensive metadata for each logical object (as well as "no follow" instructions to any search robot, so that search information is not cluttered with the full contents of each page) and a simple redirect instruction to load the actual content page.
This approach allows me a migration path to more a powerful, dynamically driven system whilst preserving the integrity of my object naming convention.