UtahRails.net Tech Talk - Web Site
...being a technical discussion of how this UtahRails web site works.
This page was last updated on February 24, 2026.
Utahrails.net, as a complete web site, is maintained using Adobe's Dreamweaver (since 2005). Dreamweaver is the choice, not for any of the bloated features of the program itself, but simply for the way it makes editing HTML data tables a lot easier, and there are a lot of data tables here at UtahRails. I do a lot of hand-coding, mostly because I know how and I understand what is needed having learned the hard way. Everything I know about web sites, HTML and CSS is self-taught, from books and from examples and tutorials on other web sites. The years since 2001 have been an interesting journey.
UtahRails uses static HTML coding, but from 2005 to 2026 used PHP server-side includes for a common page header, menu, and page footer. In October 2022, the use of PHP was reduced to include only a PHP header; no menu, and no footer. We use CSS cascading style sheets to control the actual appearance of the web pages.
(As of February 24, 2026, all pages have been converted from dynamic PHP to static HTML.)
There are hundreds of locomotive roster pages. They are formatted as standard HTML tables, with CSS to control the actual appearance of the tables.
UtahRails.net has been HTML5 compliant since 2015.
What is CSS?
CSS Tutorial (W3Schools)
CSS Tricks Almanac (CSS Selectors and CSS Properties)
What is HTML5?
HTML5 on Wikipedia (see also: HTML Wikipedia article)
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