First of all, these pages are best viewed in 1280×1024 real color
graphics mode or above. The pages will scale better than most, but as I
like tight presentation with lots of stuff visible at once, there will
be an amount of wrapping and general unpleasantness. You will want to
work in an environment with font smoothing (anti‐aliasing) capability:
this site is heavily based on text, so reading it without anti‐alias is
a gamble. Plus, it seems that some of the more esoteric characters (such
as
The pages have been written in XHTML 1.1 and they utilize CSS level 2 stylesheets (with some level 3 mixed in) for layout. The code is validated and hence correct XML/XHTML. If the pages do not display correctly, the fault is most likely in the browser. At the moment, the best result is most likely to be achieved with Mozilla Firebird 0.8+, Opera 7+, Lynx and Internet Explorer 6+, in that order—you would not believe the slew of bugs, insufficiencies and standards incompatibilities this site has unearthed in browsers, over the time.
The documents delivered under
MIME
type text/xml have begun to utilize
cross‐DTD includes
through XML
namespaces. Understandably these will
not validate under any tool until
XSchema gets
here, en force. No entity references have been used as the site is now
coded directly in
UTF‐8.
The browsers have been warned, but if weird scribbles appear, try
switching character sets manually. If this doesn’t help, too
bad—font support and character set functionality are
but two of the many things on this site to fall prey to my torture test
attitude towards Web design: basically, if your browser pretends to
support the technologies used, it had better do it properly, or else…
What happens to Netscape 4 ought to drive the message home.
W3C’s WAI guidelines have been honored as far as possible. If you find something which does not render on alternative media, tell me.
Content negotiation has been used throughout. Set the primary language of your browser to Finnish or English and place the other one further down the list in case there’s no version available in your primary language. Later images too might have alternative versions. It would be nice if you had Japanese display support installed as well, as I intend to incorporate some odd snippets of East Asian text as time goes by.
As of now, no server side includes or other sorts of dynamic stuff have been used. Client side dynamic stuff may be used in the near future, but it will in no way interfere with static browsers. The site should render just fine with any low‐tech or alternative browser, given that W3C standards have been followed to the letter.
I figured the list of technologies used by the site would make a pretty list, by now. So…