Colophon

A few words about the people and software that made this site.

This is the QuirksMode crew:

• Graphic design: Lilian Nijland.
• Original "QuirksMode" and "PPK" logos by Beng.
• Interaction consultancy: Christine van Rossum.
• Server side programming: Joost Diepenmaat (Perl for the Bug Report and Movable Type) and Chicho Marzin (PHP for Compatibility Tables).
• Client side programming and all texts: PPK

I work on Windows XP with Textpad as my main text editor.

I have no idea why anyone would find this interesting, but on colophon pages it seems to be a Must to mention your text editor. In addition, I'm about the only well known web developer who does not work on a Mac; and that's worth mentioning, if only to allow Mac fundamentalists to shout at me.

Validness

In its various incarnations, QuirksMode.org has existed from 1998 onward, although the domain name was registered only in 2003. The majority of the static resources pages were created between 1998 and 2002. This bit of background is important to understand why not all pages on this site are valid, and why that situation will never change.

Most active pages are valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The style sheets are almost valid CSS2. The JavaScript would be valid if there were a validator for it.

XHTML

However, there are quite a few exceptions to the XHTML rule:

• Some pages do not have a DOCTYPE; that's because they're quirks mode test pages.
• I use a few non-valid HTML tags, notably <wbr /> in the compatibility tables, as well as custom attributes in the blog comment forms.
• Most pages that were archived during or before the 2006 redesign were invalid; and since these pages are not maintained any more they'll stay that way forever.

Why XHTML, and not HTML? As we all know, XHTML is really XML. I want to keep the option open of importing pages by XMLHttpRequest. The current site doesn't do so, but in the future I might want to add this behaviour. In that case, it's best to import XML, and not HTML, because that gives me more leeway. Therefore it's best to make all pages valid XML.

As to the MIME type thing, I don't care about application/xml+xhtml.

CSS

The CSS contains a few declarations that the validator refuses:

• zoom, a Microsoft extension that I use to solve an obscure bug in the <pre> styles.
• display: inline-block and opacity, both of which are supported by most browsers and are perfectly valid CSS3.

Browsers

QuirksMode.org is tested in the following browsers, but it behaves perfectly in none of them. Each browser has its own quirks and oddities, and defeating all of them usually takes more time than it's worth.

• Mozilla (Firefox)
• Explorer 7 beta
• Opera
• Safari

Note the absence of Explorer 6 and lower in this list. QuirksMode.org doesn't work too well in these, and that's deliberate. Now that we have a truly CSS compliant Microsoft browser, I'm not going to waste my time on imperfect ones.