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.

While most HTML pages are formatted by putting everything into nested tables, the CSS on this site uses <div> (division) and <ul> (unordered lists) for formatting. The menus on the left are all lists, the text in the middle is set off by divisions, the paragraphs are contained within <p> markers and headers are inside <hN> (where N is a number between 1-6, with 1 being the largest headers and 6 the smallest). There are links to other pages and the few graphics markers, but otherwise, the HTML file is all text. The CSS Tutorial has more information on this, including links to other sites with additional resources. The tutorial is not a beautiful site. It is as far as the class developed the pages during the Channel Islands PC Users Group SIG. Everything done on this site is simply an extension of the SIG notes.

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 PDA (one of the tiny, hand-held devices with about a 2 inch screen) or even on my cell phone. Those devices have their own CSS formatting which they can apply to these pages -- but cannot to the usual fare. As Internet access and use grows for such devices, the importance of CSS will also grow. 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.