This website is intended to be a sort of extended CV or portfolio. Although it is about popular science, it is not itself a popular science website. Nevertheless you may find some sections interesting even if you haven't come here to find out what I do.
Browsers
I've tested this site using Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3, and Internet Explorer 6. Everything works OK with Firefox, but for some reason IE fouls up the Site Map and lays out the What's New table badly. Read a brief rant about Internet Explorer.
Structure
The main part of the site is arranged hierarchically downwards from Home. The navigation bar on the left of each page shows:
- The page's route of descent from Home
- The page's "siblings"
- The page's "offspring"
There are a few pages of information about the site that don't form part of the main hierarchy. Links to these pages are grouped separately beneath the main navigation menu on each page.
Within the text there are many links to other parts of the site. Please note that when you follow these links, you may end up in a distant part of the site. In this case your browser's "Back" button may be the quickest way to return.
Coding
I wrote the website using XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets).
The code for every page has been checked using the World Wide Web Consortium's automatic validation service. That's what the XHTML and CSS logos on each page indicate. If you click on these logos, the page will be checked, and you can see the results. If you find that I've slipped up, and the page fails the test, please contact me, and I'll fix it.
What's the point of all of this? If my XHTML 1.0 and CSS code is above reproach, it has the best chance of working on the maximum number of browsers. Interoperability, it's called.
If you're not using cascading style sheets yet, you should be. I thoroughly recommend Eric Meyer's Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide.
The navigation menus and the site map are generated automatically using a Visual Basic program. So far this seems to give me a nice balance between control over the details of the HTML and relief from drudgery.
Accessibility
There is a separate page about accessibility
Feedback
Please contact me with comments on accessibility, content, accuracy, comprehensibility, layout, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. And anything else.
A brief rant about Internet Explorer
The layout of this site is done with a web-standard system called CSS. Internet Explorer does not implement two features of CSS, namely first child selectors and adjacent sibling selectors. These useful devices enable you to automatically format elements (paragraphs for instance) in different ways if they are the first item in a block, or in different ways depending upon what immediately precedes them. For example, I might want a paragraph to have a different space before it depending upon whether the preceding element is another paragraph, a heading, or a picture. This is such an obvious thing to want to do, so why does IE not let me do it, especially as the CSS standard includes these features? Grrr.