expoweb/handbook/computing/useany.html

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<title>CUCC Website - Platform portability</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../css/main2.css" />
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<h2 id="tophead">CUCC Expedition Handbook - Online overview</h2>
<h1>Platform portability - Oct.2006</h1>
<p>[This is an archive page. It significantly pre-dates troggle.]
<p>
<img alt="What browser do you want to use ?" width=360 src="browsers-icons.jpg">
<p>The maintainers of the CUCC website are acutely sensitive to the
difficulties of our users on a variety of platforms. Indeed, most of the
editing is done on an Acorn platform (using !Zap), the website on cucc.survex.com
is served from an OpenBSD server, and pages are most commonly viewed on an
expedition PC running some shade of Linux or Windows (and now we have at least one
Linux Laptop). On the plateau, the pages live on a Psion. Pages may come from
local disc, flashcard, CD or over a network from a server which may (or may
not) be running Apache.
<p>
<a href="http://www.opencontent.org/"><img align=right src="https://anybrowser.org/campaign/images/button_takeone.gif" alt="Open Content" width="85" height="33" /></a>
In keeping with the aims of the
<a href="http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/">Any Browser Campaign</a>,
we aim to make the pages work on any browser, on any platform, degrading
gracefully when used with no images, old browsers, tiny screen resolutions
and/or no colour. We have also aimed to keep transfer and rendering times
to a minimum, especially for entry pages which new users will see first.
<p>On the other hand, we think the site is improved by the use of bits of
cave survey, photographs, maps and data laid out for legibility. Images,
imagemaps, tables and even frames are all used on the site where the
content is significantly enhanced. We have endeavoured to provide links
for non-framed browsers, text alternatives to imagemaps and descriptions
which make sense without accompanying photos or diagrams.
<p>Sometimes this has failed - for example we have not found a good way of
indexing the survey data. The way that those pages should work "intuitively"
is not actually supported by current html. Methods which overcome this when
the pages come from a server don't work when the pages are browsed locally,
and you may see this symbol in a few places as a consequence:
<p><img alt="&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;looks broken with any browser :-(" width=360 height=40
src="icons/broken.gif">
<h3>Multi-language support</h3>
<p>Our readership is international, and in particular we are an English
group writing mainly about activities in a German-speaking area. We
cooperate with cavers who are and have been active in the area, from
Austria, Germany, France, Belgium and elsewhere. Some of the material
here has been translated from publications by these other groups. Some of
it has been translated from English into other languages. We are trying
to build a scheme under which you can easily see when translations exist,
and which will also let Apache serve you a version of the page in your
preferred language where this exists.
<p>It is another aim to support speech-synthesising browsers by flagging the
language of every phrase which differs from the base-language of the page in
which it is embedded, so you don't get joke pronunciation. This is proving to
be a lot of work, invisible to most users, and still not fully supported by
html itself (eg. we can't find official language codes for Mallorcain, nor
Pidgin, both of which appear in articles in Cambridge Underground).
<hr>
<p>The CUCC pages are typically tested on the following platforms, via
net connections (LAN, and very occasionally dial-up) and on local disc,
except where stated:
<ul>
<li>Acorn RISC PC (RISC OS 3.5, 1024x768 screen)
<li>Acorn StrongARM RISC PC (RISC OS 4.02)
<li>Moderately slow PC (MS Windows 95, large screen)
<li>Faster PC (MS Windows NT 4, large screen)
<li>and again (RedHat Linux 6.0, Gnome, 1600x1200)
<li>Moderately slow PC (RedHat Linux 6.0, Gnome, 800x600)
<li>Hewlett Packard Omnibook XE<sub>2</sub> (Windows 98, 800x600, from CD-RW)
<li>same again (Mandrake Linux 6.1 + XFree86 3.3.6, KDE, 800x600, from CD-RW)
<li>Acorn A4 (RISC OS 3.1, VGA screen or 16-grey LCD)
<li>Psion 5 (EPOC, 640x240, from flash memory)
</ul>
<p>and with the following browsers:
<ul>
<li>!ArcWeb 1.92
<li>!Fresco (1.72 on RO3, 2.02 on RO4)
<li>Amaya 2.4 (Linux and Windows)
<li>Internet Explorer 2
<li>Internet Explorer 3
<li>Internet Explorer 4
<li>Internet Explorer 5
<li>Netscape 3 (just Windows)
<li>Netscape 4 (Windows and Linux)
<li>Psion/Symbian Web v2.50
</ul>
<p>That's not to say that every page gets looked at with every combination of
browser and platform every time it is changed ! A few pages have been tested
with HotJava and !BookWorm, and Opera might be on the list in the near
future. We don't have a platform that runs BeOS. Notable by its absence is
the Mac and any browser that runs on it. I haven't got one, and the last time
I had the chance to use one, it was a little 12" monochrome screen model with
a single-button mouse, before the world-wide web was invented. Things have
moved on a bit since then ...
<hr />
<p>[Rescued from old CUCC website archive - file dated 2 October 2006 - almost certainly written by Andy Waddington]
<p>See also:
<ul>
<li><a href="../website-history.html">Website history</a> - a history of the data management system up to 2019</li>
<li><a href="../c21bs.html">Taking Expo Bullshit into the 21st Century</a> - initial report from 1996</li>
</ul>
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