Site Status Report

IntroThis page mainly addresses some upfront issues regarding site status and browser compatibility. See 'My Web' for a more comprehensive discussion of the technical design issues associated with this site.

First, this site has only been tested against the later versions of the most popular browsers, e.g. IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Early versions or untested browsers may not render the correct format, e.g. IE6 is known to have several display problems, which seem to be mostly corrected by IE7. Initial testing with Firefox, Chrome, Safari seems OK, as does Opera when run on the on-line system rather than my local development copy. I have also done some testing on 15" and 17" laptop screens to check for size reformatting via CSS, which seems to be OK. While the site might work on smaller screen sizes, no testing has been done and to some extent the pictures are essentially sized for a minimum 15" screen.

Tthe main purpose of this status page is to simply outline the intended operation of the 3 navigation options, which all depend on client-side Javascripts being enabled:

  • Top bar section menu
  • Upper inset left positional menu
  • Bottom inset left tree menu

The top-level  horizontal bar menu is intended to guide you to the start of a major discussion section or secondary websites via dropdown selection options. Once at an appropriate starting point, the upper left inset menu provides relative positional navigation. which can display up to 7 possible options:

  • top - entry index.html page
  • home - home  for the current website, i.e. 1  or 2
  • up - goto the parent page, if available
  • next - goto the next page, if available
  • previous - goto the previous page, if available
  • down - goto the first child page, if available
  • sitemap - provides a more detailed indexing and description of all pages

In contrast, the bottom left inset menu provides navigation to the tree structure of the entire site. The following sub-options allow the tree menu display to be tailored to a given area of interest, which is then preserved, via a cookie, when switching between pages, although the sitemap offers better options.

  • Open/All will expand the entire tree, which is probably too long for most practical use, but can be immediately reversed via the Close/All option.

  • An alternative approach is to enter the <section> number as reflected in the top bar menu and then clicking the radio button. In a similar fashion, the required <depth> can be controlled via the second radio button.

It is hoped that the navigation options, as described above, will allow topics to be indexed and accessed in a logical manner. However, it is realised that the dependency on Javascripts may be problematic to those who have disabled this option due to security concerns, although so much content now depends on Javascripts being enabled. In addition to the content navigation, there is an extended tree index provided in the form of a Sitemap, which can also be accessed via Site Services. You can also search for specific keywords or topics via the Site Search facility and, as such, it is hoped that information of interest can be more easily found.