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Notes on Design of Site

Simplicity

There is no JavaScript on the this page, nor most of the VCC Design pages. Nor are there any of the usual formatting tools: no tables, no <font>, <blockquote> or other text formatting tags. The rest is all text with CSS formatting. If you aren't familiar with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), it is a separate section or file where all the formatting is contained.

On a modern browser, the page will shrink to fit but will only expand to 1100 pixels, so the lines of text don't get too long on very wide monitors. Many websites display their information in fixed-widths, which is easier to write, but is hard to view on cell phones and wastes a lot of space on wide monitors. Until the last 5 years or so browsers didn't support minimum-width and maximum-width, so a lot of website tools don't take advantage of them.

Probably a majority of sites still format pages using tables. The international standards body, World Wide Web Consortium (W3), tried to wean developers off table formatting starting in 1995 but they are still writing table-formatted pages. Tables are problematic on cell phones as they don't provide contextual information to the browser and are fixed-width. They are, however, much easier for automated html-generators to produce. Unfortunately, most of the webpages written in tables will have to be rewritten soon. Don't get locked in.

Portability

Because the content is self-contained, with all the formatting in a separate file, if I wish to change the looks of the pages, all I need do is change one CSS file. No more endless changes to font and other tags. And if I share the content of this page with another application, it will know what is header information, what is paragraph text and what are lists and can apply its own formatting to the document. So, I could view this page with my cell phone. Those devices have their own CSS formatting which they can apply to these pages -- but cannot to the usual fare. Even screen readers for the deaf can handle these pages, because they know how the World Wide Web Consortium defined these terms and none of the useless (for the deaf) tags are included in the page. It will "display" perfectly.

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