Principia Hypertextica · A Mathematics Educator's View of Web Design
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intro speed accessibility validity navigability typesetting links
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Links
Here are some resources on the web that address many of the issues
that I have discussed in the Principia Hypertextica pages. Your
suggestions for additions are welcome.
- Special Character Entities in HTML
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/iso8859/isotable.html
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/iso8859/isopre.html
- Alan Flavell presents charts describing the entities in ISO Latin 1
that can be used in HTML, and shows how your browser interprets them in
both regular and monospaced fonts. You
should read his page of explanation
about these charts to understand their implications.
If you want to use a Macintosh font that presents only valid entities, see my
CourierWeb page.
- The Math Forum - Ask Dr. Math
http://forum.swarthmore.edu/dr.math/
- The Swarthmore mathematics web site offers a large database of
questions and answers about mathematics at the high school level. This
demonstrates how much can be accomplished using ASCII alone.
- Adobe Acrobat Overview
http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/
- Adobe offers the free Acrobat Reader for many platforms. To create
PDF files you need to buy the Acrobat Distiller program. PDF files can
contain exact font and layout information, and they may be downloaded
from web sites.
- Text-friendly Authoring
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/alt/
- Alan Flavell discusses ways to make your web site
easy to use with text-based browsers such as Lynx.
- To Frame, Or Not To Frame?
http://www.pantos.org/atw/35295.html
- The All Things Web site has an essay on the difficulties
that frame-based sites present to users.
- WebTV Developer Documentation
http://webtv.net/primetime/
- When web pages are viewed on television using set-top technology,
the way people interact with them using a remote control may need to be
taken into consideration when you design navigation for your pages.
- Overview of All HTML Elements
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/overview.html
- The Web Design Group has prepared a comprehensive and understandable
set of pages detailing exactly which HTML elements can be nested inside
other elements. This is the best online reference to HTML I have
found.
- W3C HTML Validation Service
http://validator.w3.org/
- This free online validator will examine the HTML code of your web
pages and show you where it does not match the HTML specification. This
is a good way to guarantee that your web pages will display properly
on any HTML-compliant web browser.
- The Kinder, Gentler Validator
http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~gerald/validate/
- This free online validator at the University of Alberta, Canada,
claims that its error messages are easier to interpret than the WebTechs
messages. You need to place a <!DOCTYPE> declaration at the top of your
web page, though, to tell the validator which version of HTML you want
it to use in its evaluation.
- Public Lynx Access
http://www.crl.com/%7Esubir/lynx/public_lynx.html
- A list of telnet sites where you can use Lynx, a text-based browser.
This is a good way to see what your site looks like to many library patrons.
Also includes a link to the Lynx View simulator.
- All Things Web
http://www.pantos.org/atw/xref.html
- Terry Sullivan has prepared a large collection of essays that show
how you can write pages that are accessible and reader-friendly. A
superb resource.
- Color Perception Issues
http://www.lava.net/~dewilson/web/color.html
- Diane Wilson emphasizes that you should use color sparingly, and avoid
using colors that are hard to distinguish by people with color vision
problems.
- Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css/
- The Web Design Group presents an overview of cascading style sheets,
which allow you to suggest layout and presentation of HTML elements
without compromising the accessibility to users who do not have style
sheet capabilities in their browsers.
- Gif Wizard
http://www.gifwizard.com/
- This free online utility will reduce the size of your GIF images by
altering the number of colors in them. You get to select whichever reduced
image meets your goals.
- Bandwidth Conservation Society
http://www.infohiway.com/faster/index.html
- The material at this site is dedicated to helping people optimize the performance of their web sites by being economical about file sizes.
- Through the 6x6x6 Color Cube - An Interactive Voyage
http://www.world.std.com/~wij/color/
- I created this suite of web pages to demonstrate the 216 colors that
do not dither on most computer platforms. These are good colors to use
for GIF images and text, because you know that what others see is similar
to what you see. You can see slices of the color cube from face to face or from corner to corner.
- Yale Style Manual
http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html
- The Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media has a detailed
and well thought out approach to style on the web.
- Sun Microsystems Guide to Web Style
http://www.sun.com/styleguide/
- An interesting navigational strategy is employed at this site. Lots of
good information, if you can find it!
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intro speed accessibility validity navigability typesetting links
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http://world.std.com/~wij/web-design/links.html
revised 26 June 1997
HTML 4.0 validated
William I. Johnston Home Page
wij@world.std.com
