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Technical details about this Web site These pages can be viewed successfully using any Web browser supporting JPEG (and GIF) format images and HTML tables. These pages are tested using Internet Explorer 5.5 ("IE5.5") plus Netscape 3, 4 and 6. These pages will work on a computer with just 16 colours but the photos will look weird. If your display is set up for 256 colours, the photos will look OK, but more colours will make a BIG improvement. These pages are designed for 640 x 480 (or larger) screens, except the large photo pages which have images wider than this. Lines of text have deliberately been kept short to improve readability and black text was used on a plain white background for the same reason. The large photo display pages use a black background since it flatters the photos so I have not put much text on these pages. If you have a problem browsing these pages, or have suggestions for extra (or better!) coverage of particular topics, please send us email. We want you to enjoy our Web pages! Our previous home page is an interesting example (if not interesting to you, you are too sensible - please stop reading this page now!) of what can be done with IE4 and IE5. If you were using IE4, the larger images were displayed within the original page (and the original smaller images redisplayed if you clicked on the large images). This was much nicer than just displaying the image by itself outside a page. Several parts of the page were altered on the fly to suit these larger pictures also. I changed to the present scheme so I had fixed images around which to design a page rather than leaving large gaps for expanding images. The previous home page has been annotated in case the Dynamic HTML is of interest to you. A personal view I believe Netscape is now playing catch-up in Web browsers. v6 Netscape will allow Dynamic HTML as powerful as IE4's (as used in a basic fashion on this site) to be written for N6 and IE FIVE (NOT v4) with almost identical Dynamic HTML. Netscape 6 Preview Release 1 / 2 / 3 and "Final" Our site looks good using Netscape 6. Now I can use the same nice borders on all the small "thumbnail" images that I always used here for Internet Explorer 4 but without Netscape 6 fouling up. This change has been done. Very pleasing to enable this for the new Netscape, this site looks a lot nicer that way. 2001 Update : the "FINAL RELEASE VERSION" of Netscape 6 seems much less reliable than the Preview Releases for us - very disappointing indeed. 2002 Update : Netscape 6.2 now seems reliable but the first release of Netscape 6 was bad enough so that many previous Netscape users will have defected to Internet Explorer. IE 5.5 installed fine on the 21st August 1999; the main improvement since IE5 seems to be the Print Preview feature. IE6 seems fine also. IE5 and IE5.5 also allow fixed table layout styles to be used - this means that our pages load up faster. All pages on this site now use fixed table layouts for best possible speed. IE4 was memory-hungry but I found it fell over less often than early 4.0 versions of Netscape and the Dynamic HTML was a joy to write. IE4 seems also to load images faster than Netscape - the opposite seemed true of IE3. Netscape has a lot to do to catch up with Microsoft. Two years ago, looking at IE3 and disliking what it did and how it did it, I wouldn't have believed Microsoft could beat Netscapes browsers. I wrote these pages using Notepad (mainly, I am now using HomeSite 5 sometimes). I prefer to make my own mistakes, not have a "What You See Is ROUGHLY What You Get" program make them for me! Nonetheless, I will be trying DreamWeaver v4 at work soon, which does enable hand-editing as well as WYSIWYG. Hugh If you have any comments about this site, please send us email. |
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