Technical details Behind the scenes at Woodbine-Gerrard.com

This web site is designed to work in any browser, on any platform or operating system, no matter what your preferred window size, font-size or screen resolution. You do not need JavaScript, Java, Flash or any plug-ins, extensions or add-ons to view this site. It does not use cookies; and there are no pop-up windows. (Some features might require cookies or JavaScript in the future, but the site will always be usable without them.)

There may be the occasional page (e.g., my personal page) which works better in a standards-compliant browser, but the page will be readable even in non-conforming browsers (i.e., primarily Microsoft Internet Explorer before version 7). I do not use "browser sniffing" to serve different code to different browsers; all browsers see exactly the same HTML and CSS (style sheets).

Valid HTML 4.01 Strict
Valid CSS!

All pages on the site conform to the standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), both for HTML and CSS. (Pages can be checked on the W3C validator; there may be occasional glitches, usually caused by incorporating invalid code from someone else. If you see a page that doesn't validate, or that doesn't look right, please let me know.)

Text is never presented in images.

What never? Well, almost never. What looks fine to one person may be so small as to be unreadable to someone else; or it may be uncomfortably large.

Sometimes a logo or other large type works in an image (such as the W3C validation logos above. In such cases I try to mitigate their use by tying their size to the viewer's font size), but it will be used sparingly, and never for anything resembling body text or (where it is most often abused) navigation links.

There are no separate "accessible" pages, because there is no need for them. All pages on this site will work with any type of browser, whether graphical, text only, or speech.

Here is an overview of the hardware and software used to create and present this web site:

Web Server

Hardware
Two Intel dual-core Xeon processors running at 2.33GHz with 1GB RAM.
Operating System
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 on a 2.6.9 Linux kernel.
Web server
Apache version 1.3.37

Development environment

Hardware
Intel Pentium 4 processor running at 1.6GHz with 256MB RAM.
Operating System
Mandriva 10.2 on a 2.6.11 Linux kernel.
Web server
Apache - Advanced Extranet Server/ 2.0.53 mod_ssl/2.0.53 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
Text editor
GNU emacs 22.1.1
Image creation and manipulation