Free and Open Source Software

This is fairly easy if you're not using Microsoft Windows but even if you are it's entirely possible to build a website of whatever complexity you want without spending much, if any, money on special software.

All of the pages of this website conform to the W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD and the CSS conforms to the CSS2 specification (it would be valid CSS1 except that it uses CSS2 child selectors and the "hover" pseudo-class on the navigation menu "buttons").  That's thanks to the XHTML documents being readily available on the web at the W3C website and W3C's (a standards organization) really nice validator which you can either use online or download and install locally.  There is also a nice browsable set of standards documents with lots of examples and suggestions as well as a modified version of the W3C validator at The Web Design Group's website.  The Web Design Group's version of the validator is also downloadable and is a good bit less hassle to get working on your own computer than the one from W3C.

The software listed below was used in preparation of this website.  All of it is Free or Open Source and we have lots of folks to thank for that.

• Linux -- Created by Linus Torvalds; extended, enhanced and ported to many hardware platforms by Linus and a host of others.  Linux is POSIX-compliant and is the only operating system that we've had on our computers since 1991.  We used to build the whole thing, including most of the packages available for it, from source but nowadays the number of packages and the total size of it all has made that essentially impractical for us so we're using a prebuilt "distribution" ( ) .  We actually pay RedHat fifty bucks for a new release every year or two.  It's also what our hosting provider Modwest is using.  If you have a reasonably fast network connection you could actually install it over the net.  If you have a cable-modem connection you could download it overnight. 
• Gimp -- Makes everything from croping and scaling photographs to creating graphical logos and buttons a breeze; using either the graphical interface or programatically using Perl.
• Perl -- Perl is the brainchild of Larry Wall and he's a bit of a legend because of it.  Many people have contributed modules to Perl over the years.  It's probably the most widely used scripting language on the planet.  We use it rather heavily in generating stuff that we'd otherwise have to write code for (frequently repeatedly) in HTML.  Perl is the central component of WML.
• WML -- Website Meta Language is the toolset that brings it all together.  The learning curve is certainly steeper than you might have with a GUI-based website building tool but the flexibility is much greater.  We tried a bunch of others and found WML to be the only one that suited our needs.
• The GNU Project and The Free Software Foundation -- The FSF and particularly Richard Stallman are the originator of the concept of Free Software. (not just or necessarily price; see The Free Software Definition). Thanks to the efforts of many people all over the world no-one really has to put up with proprietary software and so-called defacto standards anymore.