Information about the page and its creation

Whilst I have tried to make the site look fairly nice, and used a few fancy things, it should work just fine in absolutely any browser.  I have concentrated more on the content than the design.  That said, there are some fancy things, and you need Internet Explorer to see them at their best.  They are non-essential, and the page will fall-back nicely enough if you don't have them.  For the most part, it doesn't even need proper rendering of tables.  It should be perfectly backwards compatible.

The page should work with a resolution of 640×480 with 256 colours.  That's as low as I can go without trashing the design.  Higher resolutions are always nicer, as you can get more on-screen at any one time.  Some of the tables get very cramped indeed when used at 640×480, but should be okay at 800×600.  Perhaps it would be best to consider 800×600 to be the lowest resolution for everything to be reliable in.  It's the commonest resolution there is (though it's starting to lose out to higher ones now).  256 colours should work, as long as the browser windows has the focus.  It works on all the machines I've tried it on.  Again, though, more colours is better.  16-bit is what I use day-to-day, and what I designed the web page in.  16-bit is also sufficient to view the various photos that are floating about the site.  24- or 32-bit colour doesn't appear to give any benefit.

The code is entirely hand-crafted, with the exception of the HTML colour chart, which was computer generated and hand modified.  The abbreviations page was put into alphabetical order with Excel, but the code was done by hand, with search and replace.  If I had FrontPage 98 or 2000 (beta, obviously) then I may use them, for some things, but it would still mostly be done in a text editor.  This provides the most control, and makes it easier for me to ensure that the page looks nice enough in older browsers.  If you want a page made, then contact me; I'm sure that something could be worked out, for a very reasonable fee; much cheaper than the so-called professionals, who can just about manage to whack a page together in FrontPage.

This site was written using a nice little text editor called TextPad.  The IE logo below was doctored with the Microsoft GIF Animator, to make it spin endlessly.  Doesn't it look nice.  The pictures were created with Paint Shop Pro.

This page should display in a sans-serif font.  It preferentially uses Gill Sans, which happens to look rather nice, and appears to ship with Office 97 Professional (though not the other versions).  Failing that, it will try to use Verdana, which is commonly available on Windows, then Helvetica (which is common on operating systems that aren't called Windows), and then the default sans-serif font, which normally means using Arial, which is not a font I like.  Whilst most browsers go through the list of font names until they find one that is installed (or a generic one like serif or sans-serif), Opera doesn't appear to, and if you use Opera, unless you have Gill Sans installed, I think it will just use your default font, be it serif or sans-serif -- it only appears to use the first in the list.

Support for Cascading Style Sheets is also kinda nice; I have used them to try to ensure some consistency, and to ensure that (in IE and NS, at least) the text is nicely justified, which is much easier to read.  The CSS works fine, except for WinNT 5 appearing to handle them differently depending on whether it's loading the page directly from disk (from file:///e:webshare/wwwroot/file.html) or from IIS (from http://www.mozzarella/file.html).  It then looks different if I load it from Apache running on Debian Linux (from http://www.coke/file.html).  From IIS it appears how I'd like it to appear, but from Apache and the hard disk it appears how it probably should appear.

I would rely on CSS more, if it weren't for the fact that different browsers interpret them so differently.  They actually make it much harder to have consistency between different browsers, with is directly opposed to the effect that they should have.  I would like, for instance, the small picture at the top of each page to be done with normal text and CSS to get tis positioning correct.  However, Netscape and Opera fail to draw it properly -- I'm using correct code, but the implementations don't work properly.  Even some versions of Internet Explorer has some problems which I can't easily work around.  Anyway, as I have no great desire to tie people to any one particular browser, I've eschewed a number of things that I would like to use.
 

It is best viewed with Internet Explorer 5.0, or maybe Netscape Communicator 4.x or any other fourth (or greater) generation table-supporting browser.  This is for your viewing pleasure.  Internet Explorer is miles better than Netscape as it doesn't crash my computer as often.  The page should even look fine in Lynx.  The browser built into the KDE File Manager also works fairly well -- better than the copy of Mozilla that I downloaded which refuses to work.  It's also nice to have a browser that supports a wide range of onMouseOver type events; in IE and newer Mozilla versions certain pictures and hyperlinks change when you plop the mouse over them.  In NS and most other broswers they don't.  They should, though.  I've worked around it, but I don't like it, at all.  Mozilla and IE can manage to do the effect properly, NS and Opera won't.

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