About the Site

This site grew out of a project I was doing as part of a web design course. At the same time I was starting the third book in the series, a short time after I had read the first, but many years after having read the second. Rereading the second book and checking back and forth with the first ... I started some notes which I thought would make an interesting exercise for a website.

So despite the specialised nature of the contents, I have tried to get a lot into the site:

• I have tested the site with IE 5 and 6, Netscape 6.2 and Opera. (It works best with Internet Explorer.) I have no idea how it works with older browsers and I don't have time to check. I have tried it with NS 4.07 under Linux and it seems to degrade fairly gracefully.
• I have tried to adhere to W3C HTML 4 and DOM standards and not to use browser-specific features or unvalidated/deprecated attributes. For example, there are no layers and I have used getElementById in preference to other methods.
• CSS has been used for formatting, separated into a linked file wherever possible. I have even done away with cellspacing=0. Some of the features I have used rely on CSS 2
• Javascript/DHTML is used for the menus and the window positioning. DOM methods are used to generated the menu.
• Unfortunately Netscape 6.2 has no equivalent to the IE "setExpression" method and has a problem with anchors in a scrolling DIV, so the layout is different/simpler for Netscape users.
• Opera does not support the CSS level 2 "overflow:auto" property at all and has a problem with dynamically changing classNames, so not only is the layout different but I have had to disable the popup menus. Opera users will therefore see the site as if they had Javascript disabled.
• SSIs are used to facilitate maintenance.
• PERL has been used to generate some of the more-or-less static HTML pages.
• Several PERL programs are used to generate the genealogy pages, through CGI. These programs are based on some freely available on the net but have been heavily customised to fit with this site's menu system (especially the SSI file) and Roman dates/names.

Any questions or comments to Mark Emerson.