Site Design
This site has been designed and constructed by Tom Zepko.
Above all else, my goal is that the content of the site be useful and informative. From a technical standpoint, I want it to be as widely compatible and as responsive as possible. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.
Tom Zepko
P.O. Box 975
Lake Arrowhead, CA 92352
Email: tom_zepko@mac.com
Tools and Techniques
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the page-description language which is the basis of every page published on the World Wide Web. This entire site is built with hand-coded HTML, using BBEdit, a plain-text editor from Bare Bones Software. This means I fuss over each page at a low level. Hand-coding is a bit more work than using an automatic page layout program, but it provides several important advantages:
- It gives me more control over the resulting page design.
- The pages are compatible with a wider variety of browsers.
- The HTML code is highly optimized and should download quickly, even with a modem connection. By comparison, the layout programs generate HTML which is far more verbose, requiring more space, slower downloads, and more effort on the part of your browser to decode and display.
All of the pages on this site conform to the XHTML 1.1 standard. This is the most up-to-date standard published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), specifying strict requirements for the syntax of the HTML code.
What this means for you is that the site is forward-looking in that it conforms to the modern syntax requirements, while remaining backward compatible for the sake of older browsers. But there are limits to backward compatibility. You should use a modern browser in the most recent version you can run successfully on your computer.
Formatting for this site is specified using Cascading Style Sheets. This means that the pages will only be formatted properly by a modern browser which supports this technology. It is usable with older browsers, but the formatting will be generic and the text plain — lacking most of the distinctions of type faces, sizes, and color coding. Paragraph spacing, indentation, and the layout of tabular information will also be affected.
I use an Apple Macintosh running the very latest version of Mac OS X for all my work. I test this site with many different browsers.
Site hosting services provided by:
Velocity Networks