Implementation

Go to: About Site : Summary » Design Goals » Design Influences » Implementation » Statistics

So how were the design goals achieved? Even with all the best design goals and influences in place, there were problems in actually implementing the desired design. Below is a brief history of the development of the site, and how it is done.

This site doesn't have fancy graphics, complicated javascript roll-overs, looping audio, and the like, in order to satify the minimalism goal.

Markup & Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets are my friend. They have allowed me to finally build a web site that doesn't rely on any markup tricks to get what I want.

When I originally started this redesign (sometime in 2001), I could not get CSS to do what I wanted – I was still relying on tables to do the formatting for me. The result: I put the project on the back burner for about a year.

Just recently (early 2003), I reread the CSS2 specifications, and gave the redesign another go. By this time, another round of browser version updates had been released, and their CSS2 compliance was much improved. I also understood CSS2 better, especially floats.

I test all HTML and CSS against the W3 validators to ensure the code conforms to the standards. It can be a slow and tedious process, but I believe it is worth the effort.

Web Browsers

Opera
Mozilla
Internet Explorer
Netscape

I also test my site using the major browsers. I personally prefer Opera to any other browser. Why? Because its standards compliance is second to none. Plus, it is fast laying out pages, gives excellent feedback as to exactly what it is doing, provides some very neat shortcuts while browsing (e.g., turn images on/off, user/author style sheets, and page zoom), and excellent cache control settings, display (fonts and colours) options, and more.

Typography

Gill Sans

Palatino

There are some exceptions, most noteably that I have used a serif font (Palatino) for the body text, instead of using sans-serif fonts throughout. Originally I used Gill Sans for the body text, but in the end, I thought Palatino looked better.

The fonts I have specified in the stylesheet are Palatino for the body text, and Gill Sans for the headings and sub text. Of cource, there is no guarantee these fonts will be installed on your system, so you may not be looking at this site as intended.

Now I know that relying on certain fonts is supposed to be a big web design faux pas, but my site doesn't rely on these fonts to look good, they're just the ones that I think make it look best. The site will work perfectly well with whatever fonts you have installed.

The hierarchical nature of the information in this site means that the typography should also be hierarchical in nature. Hence the index pages show what is available at the current level by headings down the left. To the right is a list of sub-sections