Well, it took most of yesterday, but I've finally got a working XHTML 1.0 Strict-compliant design for the site, and converted all my pages to the new design. While it's not the prettiest site, it does look nicer than the old design, I think. Plus the total size is much smaller. The best part, of course, is the ability to create completely new designs by making one file. For those of you using browsers that support alternate stylesheets, there's two available. They're both black and white, but inversions of each other.
The only thing missing is that I have a footer file that I'd like to include on every page. The alternate stylesheets show it. Unfortunately, only Opera and Mozilla-based browsers render that design properly. Konqueror and IE blow up rather badly. Plus it's not perfect anyhow. Any very specific tips would be welcome, but the current design was tediously crafted, so I'm not going to overhaul the whole thing. I require the navigation section to come second in the source to provide good text-browser support. and the content section (right column) can be any length: less than the navigation height, longer but shorter than the screen height, or several screens worth of data. I haven't found any way to accomodate this so far.
Of course, the blog template I'm using on Blogger is NOT XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. Plus, it doesn't support comments. So my next step will be to replace my blog at some point. Hopefully when that happens, I'll post more often. And probably make the blog the front page, if I integrate it properly with the rest of the site, since the front page is pretty much a pointless restatement of the navigation menu.