About This Site

The aims of this site are to:

So how have we tried to address these aims?. The basic principle is a standard software development one of "seperation of concerns". There are 3 main aspects or "concerns" of producing the pages you see on these site which are:

  1. The content of each page
  2. The layout of each page - how headers and menus are added
  3. The formatting of each page - colours, fonts, borders and white-space

Each of these aspects is addressed by a different technology which, when combined, produces the final page that you see on the screen. Hence the page content, the page layout or the page styling can each be changed independently without needing major edits of the other components.

Content

This is written in basic xhtml. There are no references to the main page header of left menu bar on each page. Markup is kept simple generally just using standard tags. There's the occasional div tag and class for special effects but, by and large, pages can be written without having to be worry about navigation or styling

Layout

The page layout is applied using XSLT (Extensible Stylesheets). This takes the title and body contents of each of the original xhtml pages and wraps extra HTML around them. Hence page layout issues are confined primarily to the XSLT file

Formatting

The fonts, colours and spacing is set up by Cascading Style-Sheets (CSS) level 2. This allows the formatting to be largely kept seperate from the page contents and the page layout

Basic pages in XHTML, processed using an XSLT stylesheet to add menus, title

Resources

Ant
Another Neat Tool - primarily for building Java progams, but also provides a convenient method for applying XSLT stylesheets to XHTML
XSLT
Extensible Stylesheet Language
CSS
Cascading Stylesheets level 2
The GIMP
Wilber the Gimp The Gnu Image Manipulation Program - free equivalent to Photoshop for Windows and Linux
Firefox Web Browser
Get FirefoxFirefox web browser - useful things such as tabbed pages. Good standards support. More advanced than IE.
Web site written and maintained by Bruce Porteous