Technical bits


These pages are made with Mac and thus fully compatible with Mac.
Logo © Apple

Mission statement

I want these pages to be accessible and readable with as many browsers as possible. However, I do not have the time to make the pages attractive and easily navigatable for every browser. I will focus on the most used ones: Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera, all of them from the somewhat older versions (from about 1999) to the newer/newest ones, all of them for Mac and PC, and make these pages as flexible as possible.
Those who have very old browsers or very old PCs or options switched off from their browsers should be knowing what they are doing and taking the consequences of that - these pages might not be as good as in the more “normal” browsers. I will concentrate on the content of these pages (which should be accessible and readable for almost everyone, as stated before).

Resolution and window size

These pages should be readable with a window size from about 300x200 to anything larger, and a resolution from 640x480 and up. You are free to resize the window to any size if you like that. It's all flexible :-)

Fonts

The font I used on these pages for the main texts is Arial, which is available for PC and Mac. Any other font will do, of course. For the titles I tagged Paul Lloyd's "Ruritania Normal". Second choice is the more common “Old English Text MT”, by the way. If you want to, you can download these fonts (search Google for it). Edit: some fonts are hard to find, you can download Ruritania here.
The font size of the main texts is not set in the site, if you have complaints about that just change the preferences in your browser.

Frames

Yes, these pages use frames - lots of it.
An alternative for the frames is available as the alphabetical site map known as Encyclopaedia.

CSS

Some pages, such as the menus, use some CSS code, but you won’t feel the disadvantages of that if it doesn’t work - you probably won’t even notice.

JavaScript

Some pages have JavaScript on it. If you don’t have JavaScript enabled, you won’t miss much. It’s just some (harmless) gimmicks.

Cookies

The only cookies on these pages are supposed to be in the cookbook. If you don't like cookies and have them switched off, it won't have any influence on these pages :-)

Plug-Ins /Music

I put midi and mp3 files on some pages. You can do without it, so you don’t really have to download Quick Time or something the like. No other plug-ins should be necessary.

Pictures

This is a site to present a world. Pictures are necessary to view the world - one picture might say more than a thousand words. This is also the reason why I want the pictures to be quite clear - and the consequence of that is that they are rather large (in kB) and it slows down a bit.
If you have pictures turned off, you’re missing a lot of information; like reading a travel guide without any pictures.
But hey, that's your choice and I don't mind.

Used software

Software I used is the regular software that came with my iMac, the Epson Stylus Printer and the AGFA Scanner: Claris Works 5.0, Kai’s Photo Soap SE and Colour It! The midi files I made with the Easy Beat demo. The mp3 files I made with iMovie (recording .mov files) and iTunes (converting to mp3) that came with my iBook. Some landscape pictures are rendered with the freeware-version of Terragen (for Mac).
All my software is legally owned or used by me.

Unzipping

Some files to download are zipped. You can unzip it with pkunzip (for DOS), Winzip (for Windows) or (for Mac) ZipIt!

PDF

I made some files in PDF. You can read them by downloading the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe, if you haven't got it installed already. Available for PC and Mac.