AlltheWeb adds new skins and becomes XHTML compliant

Fast AlltheWeb will allow searchers to choose between several designs or "skins" for its search engine. The site will also follow the latest standards for Web page coding.

Fast becomes XHTML and CSS compliant

Fast has announced that its AlltheWeb search engine will become the first major search site to fully adopt XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) when generating Web pages.

For those of you who are not that much into Web tech acronyms, we can tell you that it means that AlltheWeb will follow the latest standards for how to code Web pages and present information to browsers like Explorer, Netscape and Opera.

According to Fast this will make the site faster to load. Moreover, it will be possible to adapt the search engine results to a wider array of platforms, including small screen PDAs and mobile phones.

New "skins" for AlltheWeb

Traditional Web pages are built on plain text files (HTML or XHTML files) with various codes that decides how the page is going to look. When using cascading style sheets (CSS), however, you can put all (or most of) the information that defines the lay out in a separate CSS text file.

By changing the CSS file you may actually change the design (but normally not the content) of the Web page quite dramatically. Hence: If you control the CSS-file, you control the look of the Web page.

Pandia has already presented the AlltheWeb Alchemist contest, where people were asked to code their own CSS-files, files that can be used to give the AlltheWeb site new, alternative looks.

Fast will make some of these designs or "skins" available to the general public. FAST plans to continually experiment and add newer skins to AlltheWeb's skins gallery as end users submit them.

The first skin out is a scary Halloween design that will appear on AlltheWeb's default page on October 31st.

From that day on, users wishing to choose among skins available for AlltheWeb may also visit the AlltheWeb's skins gallery and take their pick.

See also:
"Fast AlltheWeb adds Alchemist CSS customization tool"
"Fast AlltheWeb with $750 prize for the best AlltheWeb design"

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