Information — Help

Introduction

To become acquainted with the properties and options for my site I have included this page which is divided into four parts covering:

Settings

Usage of the “Settings” Menu in the upper left of each page

Navigation

Easy Navigation with the help of anchors and several menus

Standards

About the use of Web-Standards

Browser Issues

Unresolved problems with user agents

The Settings

This little panel has a couple of entries which inform you about the current settings of a page and let you change these. But first of all there is a link included – entitled “skip menu”, mainly for text-based browsers – letting you jump right to the main heading of each page.

Change media type

The default media type of this site is application/xhtml+xml but due to older browsers or user agents not sending a proper user-agent-string for identification or not supporting this media type pages can be set to media type text/html for backward compatibility. For example Gecko-based browsers like Mozilla and Firefox or Opera from version 7.5 upwards fully support application/xhtml+xml whereas Internet Explorer does not. Thus clicking on this button when using IE presents you with a download dialogue.
If you do not know what I am talking about you will probably have no use for this option.

change language

Most pages are available in two languages, English and German. Through content-negotiation your browser should automagically supply you with the right version, the default being English. However, if you want to switch to the other version choose this link and the page will be reloaded with the alternative language setting. When doing this a cookie is saved on your machine to remember which language version you prefer.
Note that not all pages are available in both languages.

scripting

When you disabled JavaScript in your browser you are discreetly reminded of this fact as some additional features of my pages will not work without scripting enabled.

Navigation

Main Menu

The main menu is situated right at the top and bottom of each page. I included it twice to avoid the need of scrolling back to the top of each page as some pages are quite long (the largest image has a height of over 17,000px equivalent to roughly 460cm at 96DPI.

Subject Index

The Subject Index can be found at the top right as a drop-down list and at the bottom of pages. This index is included where applicable and its content links to pages related to the current subject.

Anchors

For easy reference many anchors inside pages are visible. Example: In this example, adding the anchor #infoNavigation to the end of the current page’s URL, http://www.j-a-b.net/info/info lets you directly link to this subject: http://www.j-a-b.net/info/info#infoNavigation.

Visited Links

Visited links are marked not only by a different colour but also – depending on the browser – by additional marking:

• Opera and Geckos: italic font style followed by
• Internet Explorer: italic font style

Icons and their meaning

At times you may come across small icons which have the following meaning:

— Popup

This icon shows that the following link acts as a popup. If JavaScript is disabled the referenced page is loaded inside the same window/tab.

— External Link

This icon denotes some external reference. When following this link you leave my site. External pages load in the same window/tab as the current one. Please note that not all external links are marked with this symbol.

— up

situated at the top right corner of each page clicking this arrow lets you jump right to the beginning of the current page.

— down

This arrow is found at the bottom right corner of each page and lets you jump to the end of the current page.

Note that these latter arrows are not present in Internet Explorer

  — delete

Context between these signs is greyed out and supposed to be obsolete

  — insert

Context after this sign updates the deleted text

Please note that Internet Explorer omits these symbols, only borders are visible.

Standards

Writing these pages has been quite some work and fun due to my effort of adhering to current web standards. There are a couple of very simple arguments why standards are important for me:

1. It is far easier to write pages adhering to standards than writing garbled nonsense with unpredictable results on different platforms
2. I am able to recycle quite a lot of code, leading to quicker page development
3. Using semantic markup and CSS instead of presentational markup decreases page size and thus traffic costs and page loading times
4. Pages are readable and usable on a wide variety of platforms
5. The most prominent “blind” users – search engines – can easily index pages, leading to better ranking

MarkUp

The choice of using XHTML 1.1 instead of some XHTML 1 or HTML 4 doctype is based partly on its strict rules forcing me to consider the semantic structure of a page before writing anything and, using the correct media-type application/xhtml+xml being able to immediately spot any errors in well-formedness due to the parsers of supporting browsers stopping and displaying messages according to the error encountered. Server-sided browser detection is used to serve the pages either as application/xhtml+xml or as text/html for older and/or non-supporting browsers.

Styling

Of course, no presentational markup but pure CSS is used to style all pages. In combination with the XHTML 1.1 doctype any presentational clue like inline-styling is avoided. Thus changing the appearance of any or all pages becomes very quick and easy. Apart from this, switching off page styling allows older or non-supporting browsers to display pages in their raw unstyled version without messing up anything.

Scripting

Considering the ups and downs of scripting I use as few scripts as possible. They are mainly used for performing calculations which will be supplemented in due time by server-sided scripting for users not willing or being able to use client-sided scripting. Other applications for scripting are written for the pure convenience of the user, e.g. when comparing images. In all instances ECMA-262 and DOM2 are used.

Accessibility and Usability

Every effort is done to sensibly follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). For example, title, alt, and summary attributes are supplied where applicable throughout all pages as well as longdesc attributes and corresponding links to image descriptions. I have however refrained from using accesskeys due to their addlepated browser support.

Character Encoding

All pages (less one) use UTF-8. The character encoding is set thrice, first through the HTTP -Header, second through an xml-prolog and third through a meta element to cater for utmost customariness (as no HTTP-Header is available when viewing pages offline and not all browsers support the application/xhtml+xml media type which includes the xml-prolog). The default font is “Arial Unicode MS” which covers almost entirely the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plain but most pages are displayed as well using other fonts.

Known Issues

Although these pages conform to current standards, browsers may muddle things up. In most cases some small error on the author’s side is the reason for a faulty display. But at times the author’s wit is at an end and presumably the browser is at fault. I have listed known issues with a couple of browsers which I were unable to solve — yet. Either, these issues are real browser bugs, otherwise comments and suggestions are welcome.

• Opera Issues
• Mozilla/Firefox Issues
• Internet Explorer Issues
• Safari Issues