About This Site

General

Content

This site contains stuff to enlighten readers, stuff about my works (or the actual product), and stuff about me. It explicitly will not be a blog (i.e., a chronological list of personal thoughts and events).

Optimum viewing

Want to get the most out of this site? Here’s what you’ll need:

Features

Note: To see alternate text and annotations, hover the cursor over the item in question.

Marked external links

For example: Internal link. External link.

Alternate text for images

While some text are mundane and redundant, there may be a few that are interesting, even downright priceless!

Annotated abbreviations

The first occurence of an abbreviation is often annotated. For example: P79068.

Alternate text for links

When the target of a link isn’t obvious from the link text, a tooltip title is included. For example: Hello?

Printable layout

A good print style is maintained, helpful for those wishing to print pages.

Conventions used

Standards that I’m committed to uphold. The choice to use these are somewhat debatable.

Date and time format: yyyy-mm-dd-ddd HH:MM:SS UTC

This big-endian format of mine is similar enough to ISO 8601. An example: 2007-04-13-Fri 14:59 UTC (ISO 8601 would write it as 2007-04-13T14:59Z or 20070413T1459Z.). Note: 2006-07 would mean the month of July 2006; do not confuse it with year 2006 to year 2007, which would be written as 2006–2007.

Japanese text

Text that is officially available only in Japanese (e.g. anime series and song titles) will be written in Japanese. Any attempts at using roomaji are for the courtesy of the reader (since this site is primarily in English). Also, Japanese isn’t too hard once you learn the kana and have a dictionary like WWWJDIC.

Physical quantities in SI

Measurements and calculated quantities are given in SI (International System of Units, informally known as metric).

Significant figures

Numerical data are reported to an appropriate precision.

Canadian English

As opposed to British English or American English. Canadian English is quite similar to American English, except that we retain spellings like colour and centre. But unlike the Brits, we don’t spell things like organise.

Units for data quantities

Units like KB, Mb, Kb/s, etc. respect binary prefixes and the case distinction between bits and bytes. In other words, k always means 1000, and Ki always means 1024; b means bit, and B means byte. (IEEE 1541, IEC 60027-2)

Technical

More features

Good webmasters should already employ these practices, or at the very least know them. Some of these items pertain to the proper and meaningful use of (X)HTML and CSS; others pertain to good typesetting practices.

Semantic markup

Semantic elements are used properly, including: headings, lists, definition lists, tables, images, emphasis, code. Thus, the pages look meaningful and natural (albeit not as pretty) even if CSS is removed.

Scalable layout

Almost all dimensions are based on ems, so pages scale nicely with default font size changes. The width of the page is at least as wide as the header image, and at most as wide as some number of ems or the broswer window’s width (whichever is less). (Images don’t scale, of course; and nothing can be done about that.)

Conscious use of white space

For example, vertical white space was added to lists and definition lists, which default browser styles usually lack. This is to enhance readability.

Valid XHTML 1.0 StrictValid CSSXHTML 1.0 + CSS

Pages are written in XHTML 1.0 Strict and use CSS, both of which are used with valid syntax (most of the time). Since I edit the code by hand, sometimes there are errors that persist until the next time I bother to validate.

Replay Gain

All audio files in Ogg Vorbis format have Replay Gain information.

Unicode

All pages are encoded in UTF-8, rather than silly locale-specific character sets like Shift JIS and GB2312.

Proper characters

Curved apostrophe, curved quotation marks, minus sign, multiplication sign, dashes, Greek, Japanese, etc. instead of their lame ASCII substitutes.

Browser compatibility

Mozilla Firefox 1.5

No major problems.

  • CSS: Margins for tables (<table>) do not collapse.
  • CSS: Generated text (content:) cannot be selected or copied.
  • CSS: Inline block (display: inline-block) is not supported.
  • (X)HTML: Alignment for table columns (<col align="align"/>) is not supported.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6

A few minor problems:

  • (X)HTML: Abbreviation (<abbr>) is not supported.
  • CSS: Generated quotation marks (content:) are not supported.
  • CSS: Target pseudo-class (:target) is not supported.
  • CSS: Minimum width (min-width:) is not supported.
  • CSS: Language pseudo-class (:lang(x)) is not supported.
  • CSS: Adjacent sibling selector (+) is not supported.
  • CSS: Cleared float causes rendering problems.
  • PNG: Transparency is not supported.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

A few minor problems:

  • CSS: Generated quotation marks (content:) are not supported.
  • CSS: Target highlighting (:target) is not supported.
Opera 9

No problems to report, as expected from this fine browser.

Netscape Communicator 4.8

This browser has major problems. Minor problems will not be discussed.

  • CSS: The overall half-assed support for CSS makes the page look worse than with CSS disabled.
  • CSS: Font (font-family:) is not supported.
  • CSS: Background image (background-image: url("img")) is not supported.
  • CSS: Floats (float:) cause layout chaos.
  • XHTML: Empty elements written in shorthand without parameters (e.g. <br/>) are ignored.
  • Other: Headings have unsuppressable vertical space.

Maintenance

This site is maintained by manual editing of HTML in Notepad. However, I have some help – see how each page has a menu, yet it’s always up-to-date? I have a template processor (think of it as a very primitive form of XSLT). Also, external CSS files significantly reduce the need to update every single page for certain changes.

Files are uploaded to the server manually using SFTP.

Maybe I can use revision control software someday, since syncing my local copy of the site to the one on the server isn’t my favourite activity.

Tools used

Last modified: 2007-10-18-Thu
Created: 2007-04-23-Mon