Browsers older than approximately two years may not display this site’s pages correctly.
We recommend that you take a moment to update your browser software. It’s free, and it will improve your entire web experience. Simply click on the appropriate link below (these links won’t download the software; they take you to the appropriate web page only).
This website is written with a vision toward the future. Many methods widely used in web design up until a few years ago are being phased out by browser software, and will not be supported in a few years. Techniques were used in the design of this website to ensure future compatibility, as well as ease of modification.
You may notice at the bottom of each page there is a small link called “Validate HTML.” What this link does is check the HTML code of that page against a specific set of standards for code-writers. I have declared that I will adhere to HTML 4.01 strict, so that is the set of criteria used to validate each page’s code.
To make inroads to making this site completely accessible to persons with disabilities (specifically, but not limited to, visual impairment), I have included titles and alternate text with most links and images. This enables the screen-reading software to read the picture when it cannot be seen.
Also implemented is a skip link in all pages, which allows screen-reading software to skip “reading” the entire navigation bar for every page visited.
I have also checked the design of the site to ensure that people with various levels of colour-blindness can still easily read the content and recognize the links.
A very good on-line tutorial for accessibility is available free from Dive Into Accessibility.
The pages on this site conform to HTML 4.01 Strict, as defined by the W3C World Wide Web Consortium (note the button at the bottom of this page). Because I didn’t like the look of the button on the bottom of the pages, I committed it from every page except this one and the browser update page. Instead there is a link in the footer that you can click on to validate any page. As of this writing all the pages validate.
I have opted to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for the formatting of this web site. CSS is widely recognized as the proper way to format web pages, and has been recommended by the W3C since 1996 None of the HTML code in the site contains straight-ahead formatting (like font color); instead, all formatting is made and edited in one document for the entire site.
Using CSS to apply layout and formatting to a site has many significant advantages over using HTML formatting tags (such as bold, font size, etc.), many of which are or will be deprecated by the W3C. CSS enables faster page downloads, more efficient design modification, and more streamlined site maintenance than coding every page in a site. Read more from W3C about CSS.
Thank you!
~Karin