Site Design, Standards, and Accessibility

This site supports open standards and accessibility.

• Graphics. Graphics are used as necessary to display, err, graphics, and to enhance navigation. But graphics always include an "alt" tag. Why? This supports text browsers, used by people with slow connections, various disabilities, and people who pay by bandwidth used.
• User interface generally. Yes, the UI is generally geeky; a big outline, lots of text, etc. The editor is a geek and not a graphic designer. But she happens to also think that sometimes well-organized text can be more friendly than a shiny shiny graphical form that tries to compress lots of information into a few categories.
• Standards. We use standardized HTML code, and avoid proprietary extensions. This allows people using any browser that adheres to standards to access the content.
• Fully SGML compliant. Getting there, getting there. I had some old bad habits developed through usage of pure HTML, and so the site is slowly converting to be fully compliant.
• Version degrading. Okay, we're not so good at this. We use, for instance, cascading style sheets (CSS), which are not correctly handled by all older browser versions.
• Browser testing. We've tested in lynx (works great), various versions of netscape & internet explorer (mixed results in versions 4.x and below), opera, mozilla, and galeon; on mac, windows, and linux machines.
• Disability friendly. Committed to keeping this site as accessible as possible, by minimizing use of graphics, maintaining non-graphical navigational alternatives, and keeping almost all content in non-proprietary, text-friendly formats. Exceptions include only image files of graphical art, which do include some brief description in the alt tags.