e-nor.net

Welcome to e-nor.net - this is a personal website that contains information on various areas of computing technology that I have been digging into.

I hope you find it useful.

e-nor.net index page

Some techie notes about the design

All the pages are hand coded. At the moment, I use GEDIT exclusively for writing the pages, GEDIT is a clever text editor for Linux - it knows about different character coding, so I can specify UTF8. It also recognises the type of script being written, and colourises the coding appropriately.

The newer pages on this site use XHTML and an external stylesheet, with most of the layout for visual browsers specified within the stylesheet, in order to make a fully scalable layout.

Older pages on this website uses a table for layout on visual browsers.

If you are not using a visual browser, you may want to know that the table used for layout has a single row, and three columns - the first column contains no information, the second column contains all the information, and the third column contains no information.

As well as the layout table, some of the pages contain other small tables.

Using a table for layout is sort of just tolerated by W3C, but they strongly recommend using an external CSS for layout.

The website design has been tested on Firefox, Opera, IE7, and IE8. It works fine on all of them, with one exception. One problem I haven`t resolved is that the zoom function in IE7 breaks the website somewhat, in two different ways :-

With a fully scalable web page design, since the page has already filled across the width of the screen, the zoom function in IE7 - when making things bigger - means you end up with parts of the web page outside the edges of the screen, and you have to scroll left and right to read each line. It also happens with fixed width sites, where the amount of magnification takes the fixed width beyond the sides of the screen.
The zoom function in IE7 somehow manages to loose the spatial correlation of text, and the space around the text. This is a known fault with IE7, it affects some other websites as well, not just this one. The text enlargement feature works okay, it is just the zoom function that has this deficiency.

If you need to use a zoom function regularily, it might be worthwhile using other browsers like Firefox or Opera, they work fine, or upgrade to IE8.

It is a bit of a dilemma - do you design a web site to be fully standards compliant, and fully scalable, and accept that some browsers will break the site, or do you throw away those design principles, and design the site so that it works okay in one specific browser. However since Firefox, Opera, and IE8 work okay, I`m going to stay with the first option.

Another interesting problem that is happening now, is the growth in the number of wide screen LCD monitors now being sold. Some of these have resolutions up to 1920 x 1200 pixels. If this site is expanded across a width of 1920 pixels, it just looks silly. So I have put a wrapper round the site with a bit of code which restricts the width to 1100 pixels. So for screen widths between 640 pixels and 1100 pixels, the site is scalable. For screen widths greater than 1100 pixels, it acts as a fixed width site, and looks much nicer.

The nice thing about scalable sites is that they lessen the impact of variations in browser screen resolution as described in the Google map - Google has done research into this, and they have produced a map which is viewable at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com - according to this, over 98% of users with their various screen resolutions will see this website without horizontal scrolling - and at the same time users with resolutions up to 1100 pixels get a full size display. Although horizontal scrolling is a bit tedious, it is quite natural and intuitive to scroll vertically, so information can be evenly distributed over the whole required height of the web page.

As a final note, none of my websites use "cookies" or include any kind of user tracking software.

Legal stuff and disclaimer

Most material on this website is copyright.

Any company names or products mentioned in this site may be trademarks of their respective owners.

All information on this website is presented as understood by the author. No guarantee is given that any of the information on this website is correct or accurate. No liability or responsibility exists for any damage or loss caused by the use of this information.