Main text
Web design
New design with Cascading Style Sheets
The new design complies to current web standards for XHTML 1.0 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). That way, the description of content and looks can be seperated from each other, which makes maintaining a site much easier and offers more possibilities for design. To display these pages correctly a browser which supports these standards is mandatory, for instance:
- Mozilla or Netscape 6.x
- MS Internet Explorer 5.x and later
- Opera 5.x (with some restrictions) and later
You don't need to worry about print-outs, by the way. They are handled by a second CSS which modifies colors and hides the navigation bars.
Browsers like Netscape Communicator or Internet Explorer 4.x and older either have only limited support for Cascading Style Sheets - and often misinterpret them. I have tried to design the code in a way that even Netscape Communicator 4.61 for OS/2 produces a readable display. For printing you have to turn on the option Black text in the File -> Page setup... menu to make Communicator print all letters in black.
If you are using a browser without CSS support, the result is determined by the "raw" HTML. Browsers of this category are the current versions of Links and Lynx, and old browsers like Netscape Navigator, IBM Web Explorer, and Mosaic as well.
Do yourself and others a favor and use standard-compliant browsers only! Mozilla may be huge, but once it has been loaded, it runs fast enough, even on such old machines as a Pentium Pro 200 with 128 MB.
Another new feature is the automatic language selection. The server detects which language (English or German) you have selected as preferred in your browser's configuration and automatically sends the corresponding file. For other languages, the English version is "served". If for some reason you want to see the other language version of a page, you can do so by appending .de for German or .en for English. http://www.os2world.com/os2files/webdesign.html.de will always display the German version of this page, for instance.
A few words about this web site
For a long time this web site didn't have much to offer. That changed rapidly however after I had decided to continue the document "How to supercharge OS/2 Warp" and to establish my "The X11 Files" section. Since I wanted to offer all information bilingual and didn't want to drop my idea of the white-on-black design, a lot of writing and copying was to come.
By using the excellent pre-processor PPWIZARD by Dennis Bareis I was able to save an enormous amount of time and nerves. This free program allows to change a link (e.g. my e-mail address) on the whole site just by adapting one file. In addition I have written a macro that is capable of detecting the size of an image and inserting the appropriate values for the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes of the IMG tag. Headers only have to be coded once. The tables on these pages presenting news and the list of tools are generated by importing the text from a plain text file. The original HTML file only contains definitions for the import.
If you have to maintain many pages with similar or similarly structured content and your server doesn't provide support for scripts, you should have a closer look at PPWIZARD. Even you have the support it may be advisable if the content of your pages doesn't change that often.
By the way, the HTML sources of the pages were hand-coded using the editors Emacs and EPM, and checked with the HTML Tidy tool.