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Much image activity these past couple of months: added a couple of photos of committee members to prc.php, then was asked to put Richard Offen's slide collection Bells and Bell Ringing on the site. Somewhere in between I'd put Derek Sibson's photo on officers.php - necessitating re-arrangement of other entries on the page. Created Tower Stewardship Committee page - with photo of Ernie Runciman. Of course I then realised that I'd used several different coding techniques and image source file arrangements. Initially put the slide collection on the site as two pages, each an ordered list: one of thumbnails linked to the full-sized images and the second of the background notes. Quickly realised this quick and dirty approach would be difficult to maintain let alone be difficult for the viewer to follow. This, together with the sheer size of the collection (initially 50 or so slides and likely to grow, plus a thumbnail version of each) encouraged my tendency to build php functions to format the page. For ease of initial coding put the information for the images (source address, title, notes, etc) into a series of arrays in an include file, with a php call for each image in the BellsAndBellRinging.php page. Plan to consolidate further by combining these two files, putting the individual arrays into a master array and building the page with a do while loop instead of individual php calls.
Finally got my head around ImageMagick sufficiently to be able to create thumbnails from original image files - at least from those which have the desired aspect ratio. Will have to learn more about cropping.
As the photo files of Council members were becoming scattered around various committee sub-directories have started to consolidate them into /cccbr/cccbr/memberPhotos/. Perhaps this will be of interest to the Biographies Committee also.
All PHP-generated pages (ie most pages except the Home page) now laid out with CSS in place of HTML tables. The use of CSS for layout improves accessibility for viewers with disabilities and, by separating appearance from content, simplifies maintenance and development.
The style of these pages has also been upgraded to improve legibility and a separate CSS style has been sheet introduced to provide better printed output, using a serif font and suppressing the logo and banner.
Recently discovered, in the course of answering a question from another webmaster, that I had been using an obsolete DOCTYPE declaration for the home page and all the PHP-generated pages, probably explaining why Firefox didn't render the CSS correctly. Home page now conforming to and correctly identified as HTML 4.01 Strict, many PHP-generated pages ditto HTML 4.01 Transitional - pending time to go through them individually to clean up (for example) align='center' attributes.
Significant internal improvement to generation of members.php and members_index.php. All entries in these files are generated by two functions in i_contactinfo.php. In this way members details only appear in the latter file, considerably simplifying routine updates. Triennial updates to these files now being received.
Assisted Richard Allton in transferring the Records Committee pages from www.ringing.org. This set of pages consists of a 'Home' page and plus a set of seven data display pages - a relatively 'flat' layout. Consequently a new top menu bar style was developed to facilitate navigation among the pages. Line entry functions were developed to simplify and eliminate duplication from the source code.
Cleaned up crumbsline implementation, in particular for toc.php and topicalindex.php.
Following comments that the Home page had become cluttered with a large number of links in small text which were difficult to read, the Welcome page (introduced a year ago to provide a large image to attract the attention of non-ringers) has been discontinued and a simpler Home page has been introduced with just a few links embedded in the central text which is flanked by the Key Links and Site News panels. The majority of the links which crowded the former Home page are now accessible from the text-embedded links to the "Committees" and "Selected ringing links" pages. The image of bells being rung, formerly on the Welcome page, has been incorporated into the "What is Change Ringing?" page.
The layout of the new Home page is controlled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and no longer uses HTML tables for this purpose, improving accessibility for disabled persons and for those using older browsers. The remaining pages on the site will be converted to CSS layout in the near future.
Converted other pages to the new style, roughly coinciding with the publishing in mid-February of the completely re-written Dove pages, now in separate sub-directory.
Published Education Committee pages and CfRB page, both in the new style.
Completed adaptation of Education Committee pages and published for review.
Implemented an obfuscation technique for email addresses on the CC Members and CC Officers pages to make it more difficult for these addresses to be harvested for use by spammers, following a complaint about an email with a distribution list which may well have been derived from the Members file.
Began adapting other pages (including dove.htm) to new style and consolidating all contact information into a common include file for ease of maintenance.
After much experimentation decided to abandon CSS layout in favour of a single html table. On 9 October launched a new Welcome (index.html) page for non-ringers and a new Home (siteindex.html) page with four columns of links to over 40 pages on this site and a dozen or so links to other related sites, in addition to highlighted areas for key links and news.
Started adapting Education Committee pages to new style using left menus only for links within the page itself or to related pages within the same section of the site. Navigation context within the site as a whole is provided at the top of each page by a breadcrumbs trail of links back to the Home page, which will greatly simplify maintenance.
Now proceeding to adapt sample code from HTML Utopia to build a new sample of a low-level Education committee page using CSS layout to provide modern browsers (IE6 for W, NS & Opera 6 & 7, Mozilla 1) with banner at top, high-level menu on left, central content column, low-level menu on right, footer below. Source code arranged in that sequence will provide text-readers and CSS-challenged browsers to see those elements arranged vertically in that sequence.
Because of likely delay in completing sample and selling this approach, proceeding in parallel to transfer Education committee pages from Fred Bone's site in their current format. While doing this, to reduce opportunities for future updating errors, all links and variable data (email addresses, etc) which may also appear in other pages are being externalised as PHP variables defined in a pair of PHP files accessible to all pages in the site.
Also removed re-directs for HTML pages replaced by PHP in October 2002.
Mention of the UK Disability Discrimination Act at the 2003 Council meeting prompted research into this topic via documents received from Alan Chantler and perusal of the W3C guidelines and other material on the web. This is very much against the use of HTML tables, which cause text-reader software to read across the page ignoring table boundaries, among other problems. Suitably arranged CSS-laid-out page source, on the other hand benefits in the same way as CSS-challenged browsers as noted under May below.
After significant reading and research, came across sample chapters of 'HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables using CSS', which focusses on the CSS1 and CSS2 facilities for layout. Bought copy of the book, and discovered useful advice about arranging the HTML code to provide a semblance of usability: basically put the menu code before the content code, followed by the right column code if any.
Experimentation with a third level of menu and using an abridged menu context for hte more detailed pages of the Education committee's pages (to be transferred from Fred Bone's personal webspace) agreed with John Harrison (chairman of the committee) that this wasn't satisfactory - especially as the indentation, background colours and font size CSS specifications weren't being recognised by his browser.
Navigation menus and the headers and footers of most pages are now generated by a single set of three php files, greatly simplifying site maintenance and the addition of new pages to the menus. Exceptions are the Home page, which is the only page displaying content to the right of the main column, and the Dove's Guide pages which are maintained separately.
The former main menu item Publications which linked to the Central Council Publications Price List page has been moved into a new topical section named Publications and renamed CC Publications. The existing pages Bibliography; Guidelines and The Ringing World; and a new page Newsletters can also be found in the Publications section.
The following changes have been made to the arrangement of information on this website.
First, the navigation menu on the left side of each page has been enhanced to allow any menu item to expand to reveal a second level of more detailed information related to any particular topic. This makes it possible to provide menu access to the increasing number of pages without excessively long menus on every page.
Second, by use of this two-level menu system, both existing material and new pages are being grouped into sections by topic. It is expected that this will make the information more accessible not only to ringers, but also to non-ringers who may find the site.
A consequence of these changes is that a number of existing pages have been moved into different directories or folders, and many have been renamed. Frequent visitors may therefore need to update some of their bookmarks.
The recent changes are summarised below: