Notes and Acknowledgements

I aim to have the site compliant with the HTML4.1 standard ASAP.

In developing this site over its lifetime I have changed from simple text based links to Javascript managed links to CSS links. In doing this I have found, like many others, that not every browser is capable of handling CSS correctly. So why use CSS? Well it is the W3C recommended way for a start. But, more importantly, it permits graceful degradation of the site’s behaviour. So an older or limited browser is still able to move around the site. This is not easily done with Javascript as some users turn scripting off.

If you do not have JavaScript enabled then quite a lot of functionality in the site will be unavailable as I make fairly heavy use of its features, particularly in the running section where the calculators are all script driven. In addition all photos not in a slideshow are thumbnails that link via a script to the full picture. The slide shows are dynamically generated by JavaScript as well.

Cookies

This site uses cookies in a limited way. One cookie is used to record the time of your last visit. This is then used to indicate any updated section since that time. Another cookie is used to record settings in the running calculators. Finally a cookie is used on each of the Hard Rock, Classic Rock etc. pages to determine what information to show when you click on one of the route links.

Despite offers, I hope not to have to use adverts to keep the site going. One reason for this is that quite a few of the new dynamic adverts use ActiveX controls. Whilst the idea behind ActiveX is fine (distributed computing and software components) the security model it uses is unable to distinguish between those controls you have explicitly chosen to install as part of some software and those that Internet Explorer, in particular, assumes that you want to run. In addition ActiveX itself is proprietary to Microsoft so may not be available to users of other browsers or those on other platforms.

Acknowledgements

Code reuse is always to be recommended. Much of the Javascript that runs most of this site is based on the work of others so here are the guilty parties....

The show_photo JavaScript function was taken from this HTML tutorial and modified a little to do more along the lines of what I wanted it to do.

The daylight calculator used in the running section uses code originally written by Juergen Giesen, and came from GeoAstro

The Easter day (and consequently the easter Monday and Good Friday) calculations are based on code from GM Arts

The table sorting code came from Stuart Longridge at Kyrogenix.org

The site indexing and search facility came from Build Website 4U