These pages have been coded with accessibility and standards conformance in mind. The goal is to have a set of pages that can display properly in a variety of devices from computer monitors, to PDAs, to printed paper, and that will continue to display properly for a long period. A subgoal is to explore and experiment with new web authoring techniques.
In order to achieve this goal, these pages have been coded using only standard XHTML and CSS. XHTML 1.0 Strict was chosen as the standard of the future. XHTML 1.1 seems to cause problems with many older browsers still in use. Content is cleanly separated from presentation: all layout and positioning is done through the use of cascading style sheets. The layout was achieved without the use of tables but with CSS positioning properties. The advantage is a fluid layout that adapts very well in changes of text and window size. The disadvantage is that older (e.g., Netscape 4.x) or very buggy (e.g. Internet Explorer) browsers may not render the layout correctly (although the information will still be shown). Mozilla handles, of course, the page without errors.
Every page includes a stylesheet which is used automatically when printing, a stylesheet that excludes for example navigation links, so there is no need for a special "printer-friendly" version.
The design of the page was inspired from A black raindrop although it has been changed to suit my preferences (and the code is significantly different).
The fonts used are Bitstream Vera and Bitstream Vera Sans. These fonts have been kindly released by Bitstream under an open-source license and may be downloaded for free from this location. If you don't have them installed on your computer the page should display instead in Georgia and Trebuchet MS or, failing that, in your system's serif and sans-serif font respectively.
You are free to examine the source and use anything you find useful.
You may want to have a look at the following links:
- A List Apart, a great source for many web authoring ideas.
- HTML Dog, a good practice guide to HTML and CSS.
- Eric Meyers's web, for some cool advanced CSS tricks.
- Style.org, one of the most beautiful pages on the web.
