About This Site - Jim.Kearman.com

ABOUT THIS SITE (Updated August 18, 2013)

As you can see, Jim.Kearman.com is mostly a collection of links to other sites. My content-oriented sites are at other subdomains of kearman.com. This page serves as a description of my design philosophy, and the evolution of this site.

A Note on Accessibility

I am working to make this site more accessible to all visitors.

Some links to external sites inside and outside the Kearman.com domain use the Javascript event handler to open the page in a new browser window. You must have Javascript enabled to use this feature, or the page will open in the same browser window. If you have disabled scripting in your browser, right click on the link and select "Open Link in New Window" (Mozilla/Firefox) or "Open in New Window" (Internet Explorer).

Another Javascript is used to reload images on the Webcams page. If you have disabled scripting, use Shift + Reload (Refresh) button (or F5) to update the image.

This site is also optimized for handheld devices by means of a separate stylesheet.

Welcome Handheld Users

If you're reading this your device has indicated it is a PDA or other handheld device. All features viewable on a PC are fully functional on your device as well.

A Brief History

My first Website, created with Microsoft FrontPage 98, went online in 1998. Over the years I’ve tended toward simpler layouts, as the novelty of glitz wore off! I no longer use a WYSIWYG HTML editor; I write all the code with EditPlus2, an excellent text editor. As design technology has evolved to the division of presentation and content into separate stylesheets and HTML pages, a good text editor is the best tool to have.

CSS Positioning

In 2003 I started making the transition from table-based layout to what's known as CSS positioning. This was in keeping with the ideas behind the CSS2 stylesheet standards, and the forthcoming CSS3 standards. The HTML page should contain content; all presentation features, such as the positioning of text and images, colors, and font specifications, should be handled in a separate stylesheet. Tables should be used only for tabulated data, not as page-layout devices. There are several good tutorials for CSS positioning online, which you can find using Google or your favorite search engine. There is also a book that many people recommend, but I think you can learn what you need from the tutorials, and by studying source code and stylesheets. Moving all presentation information to the stylesheet makes for a very simple HTML page, which is easy to update. And having all presentation information in one stylesheet makes it much easier to change the appearance of your site later, and eliminates the need to repeat presentation information over and over on each page. A good place to start learning is the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium, the standards organization for the Web) CSS tutorial, at W3C.org.

XHTML

Since the late 1990s, the W3C has been recommending extensible HTML, called XHTML, in lieu of HTML. You can learn more about the whys and hows of XHTML at the W3C site. XHTML was a marriage of HTML and XML (extensible markup language), intended to enhance our ability to index and catalog the explosion of online information. A truly XHTML-compliant browser, such as Mozilla or Firefox, also required the Web designer to write better code. Internet Explorer, for example, will guess at mistakes in coding and usually displays something similar to what the designer had in mind. As the Web expands into other devices, though, such forgiveness may not be possible, and allowing for it also complicates browser design.

Once you understand the ins and outs of CSS, making the transition to XHTML is very simple. The emphasis on clean code may annoy some people, but why not put as much care into the mechanics of your site as you do into the content and appearance? Once you get into the habit of using lowercase tags, properly closing 'empty tags' (such as meta, img or br), it's no harder to write XHTML-compliant code than questionable HTML. The W3C has an online validator application that you can use to check pages on your PC or online. It lists errors by line number. I confess that most of my sites were not valid HTML, so I had some work to do to make them validate as XHTML, but after the first few pages I used EditPlus2's search and replace feature, and the work went quickly. Then it became a matter of pride to me to make every page on all the subdomains comply with the XHTML standard.

HTML5

Alas! The overseers of Web standards came to see XHTML as the wrong fork. HTML5, an evolving standard in 2013, is in some ways a return to the earlier HTML 4 standard. Many HTML 4 functions deprecated in XHTML have returned in HTML5! HTML5 offers many new features, most of which won't be useful on this site.

Browsers

While learning about CSS and XHTML, I learned some hard lessons about Web browsers, too. The hands-down favorite browser is Internet Explorer, mainly because Microsoft includes it in Windows and most people use it without a second thought. Aside from the enormous number of security flaws, Internet Explorer does not display HTML in accordance with universally accepted standards. Redmond is in a universe of its own, I guess. When I started looking at my pages with Mozilla and Firefox (both available from mozilla.org), I almost fainted. If you're designing Websites, you really must have one of those browsers. Unfortunately, what looks correct on a Mozilla browser may not look correct with IE, but there are some CSS tricks that will make pages look the same on both. I intend to write about them in a later update, to be linked from this page. I believe that every page on all my sites now displays properly on all current browsers. Some pages use Javascript, which should also work on all current browsers, assuming Javascript is enabled.

There are other ways to view Websites besides PC browsers, of course, and another on-going project is to make as many pages as possible viewable on handheld devices, or with text-to-speech applications, and browsers intended for visually and physically disadvantaged viewers. These are subjects worthy of a book by themselves, and several are available. Again, you can find what you need to know online, with a little help from a search engine. My tips page will include information about the steps I’ve taken to accommodate other types of browsers.

Of course, making a site compatible with state-of-the-art browsers can result in viewing problems for users of older browsers. As much as possible I have tried to accommodate older browsers, but users of IE 5, for example, may think there are glitches on several pages. IE5/5.5 was flawed in its representation of certain design elements. For those users I recommend upgrading to Firefox. Actually, I recommend that everyone using any version of Internet Explorer upgrade to Firefox. It’s free, easy to install, and safer to use. You may occasionally run across a site that requires Internet Explorer, but they are few.

Site Hosting

I had been hosting this site with HostDime in Orlando, Florida, since early 2002. They were reliable, had good tech support, and are inexpensive. Beginning in early 2007 it became Website hell, with multiple outages of the site and my email accounts. After dozens of lost hours I quit and moved the site to HostGator in February 2007. So far their service has been excellent and I don't regret the trouble it took to relocate.

Summary

Thanks for your interest in my site. A Website is a great hobby, and much less expensive than most other hobbies I’ve encountered over the years. Here are links to sites mentioned on this page: