About This Site

Back Home

A Few Notes About This Site

This site was built by hand using a few cascading style sheet (CSS) to help with the layout. I have always been a fan of simple web design that allows easy visual scanning by way of things like margin notes, menus etc. To me, the most useful sites can be navigated quickly, without reading a significant amount of irrelevant text.

As I began constructing this site, I examined a number of sites on the web to try to determine whether CSS would meet my formatting needs. After a fair amount of deliberation, I decided that they would be a significant improvement on my original (pre-style-sheet) approach. My style sheets are modifications of some that I found on bluerobot's layout reservior. The layout reservoir doesn't have a huge selection of styles to look at, but I love their minimalist look.

Homegrown Meta-HTML Before style sheets were well supported by browsers, I was decided to do my layout using a fairly complex set of nested tables. To some extent, the complexity was mitigated by my use of a meta-level markup language (MLML) that I designed specifically for my site. The MLML effectively enforced a template based approach to creating a standardized look and feel for the nested tables which defined my site. Although this made it (theoretically) faster and easier to design the web site, it also meant that anytime I made changes, the pages needed to be post-processed before they could be viewed. Worse, it meant I had two copies of each web page, a meta-level description and then the post-processed and ready to view version. Fortunately, now that CSS has reached a new level of maturity and is fairly well supported by modern browsers, my MLML can be put into the closet of old tricks.

Some thoughts on
text layout In my mind, the ability to change the look and feel of a text document is often a huge asset. By keeping the text separate from distinct layout information, it is possible to modify large documents or many small documents in one fell swoop just by changing the layout settings. CSS, Latex, and my MLML, all have this ability. In the technical documents, this is why I prefer using LaTex over standard word processing programs such as Microsoft Word. Just like cascading style sheets, LaTex class files provide all of the layout rules for a particular document. Thus, when you're writing the document, you can focus on the content, not the format. You simply need to markup the text in a manner similar to html, and then run the postprocessor to construct a printable document. If you are at all technically inclined, and find yourself frustrated by the difficutly of ensuring that your documents follow a consistent format, take the time to investigate LaTex.