About our site.
Bob began writing this site in July 2003, as a present for his wonderful fiancée, Sonnet.
The green and red colors in the title are symbolic of us - Bob and Sonnet. The green represents
Bob's Scotch/Irish background; the red represents Sonnet's Chinese heritage. However, they could have
many other meanings as well. A modern Chinese poem uses the imagery of red
and green contrasting to a world of grey to represent rebirth of the Chinese spirit; however, I find it
oddly applicable to our own two lives as well. Like in the poem, we are two children that have brought
color to each other's worlds.
Design goals.
The goals for this site were:
- To use only compliant CSS and XHTML which validated in all cases.
- To have a simple layout that worked identically across browsers.
- To avoid using any tables, images, or Javascript for layout, for simplicity and accessibility.
- To have a layout which degraded gracefully if the stylesheets were turned off completely.
One goal that was definitely not pursued was to make the site degrade gracefully in older browsers,
such as Netscape Navigator 4. This site makes great use of the layout tools provided by CSS2, which
really helps the simplicity of the site. I don't know if the site displays well in NN4 or not, and I
don't really care, either.
Tools.
The tools used in constructing this site include the following:
- A plain text editor. This is the most useful tool for constructing websites from scratch. Really.
- The XHTML specification, and
the CSS specification.
- Multiple browsers for testing, including Internet Explorer
and, my favorite, Mozilla Firebird.
- Later on, PHP was used to simplify the pages for deployment, by
breaking out the pages into multiple parts that the server could reassemble. This allows, for example,
changes to links or headers that can be made in one place and automatically update all pages on the site.