About This Site

Neat Decorative Graphic

Accessibility
This web site is compliant with the bulk of the WCAG 1.0 recommendations, and is mostly compliant with Section 508 of the ADA. As it is being updated, it is voluntarily being brought into full WCAG- and ADA-compliance.

Along with the main navigation links on the left side of the site (in graphical browsers), all sections of the site are accessible via text links at the bottom of every page. Each of these links has a single letter in bold; this letter is the access key for that link. By pressing the corresponding key on your keyboard in conjunction with a modifier (usually control), you can activate the link in most modern browsers as though you had clicked on it.

This web site does not include a search feature. However, it does include a comprehensive site map.

Technology
This web site has been developed in accordance with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, including Cascading Style Sheets 1/2 and HTML 4 markup. Every single page in this site has been painstakingly designed to be in full compliance with those standards, and has been checked by and approved as error-free by the W3C's validation engines. To verify this, simply click on the "validate HTML" or "validate CSS" links at the bottom of any page.

Modern, standards-compliant browsers like Netscape 7+, Mozilla, Safari, and OmniWeb 4.5+ should be able to properly render this site without any problems. Non-compliant browsers (such as pre-Mozilla versions of Netscape) may have issues, although, unless they're downright buggy (as those pre-Mozilla versions of Netscape were!), you should be able to at least read all the content and navigate the site - it just won't be as pretty.

Hosting
This site is hosted at pair Networks, Inc. and served by the Apache web server. It makes extensive use of the PHP scripting language and MySQL DBMS. This pair/Apache/MySQL/PHP combination is a potent one that is tough to beat in terms of performance, reliability, features, and value; we highly recommend it!

For the first five years of its life, this site was served from a Macintosh server hosted at MacConnect using 4D's WebSTAR web server and Purity's exceptional WebSiphon middleware product. Unfortunately, this setup no longer met all of our requirements (including inexpensive, native OS X development), which is why we switched in July 2003.

Tools Used
While visual HTML editors like Microsoft's FrontPage and Adobe's GoLive can make producing web pages extremely easy, the code they produce is much denser than it needs to be (thus increasing download times), and worse, is typically full of errors. A test to prove this is to create a simple page in one of these programs, post it, then run it through the W3C validator; chances are, you'll get a number of errors - errors which cause each browser to render the page differently than other browsers.

Because of this, this site has been coded entirely by hand using Bare Bones Software's wonderful BBEdit, which is simply the best text editor on any platform, bar none. Coding is done under Mac OS X, which allows us to recreate the server environment at no cost to ease development and testing.

Some of the miscellaneous other applications we use include Bugzilla, Web Validator, Interarchy and CocoaMySQL.

All contents copyright ©1998-2004 TriVectus, LC. All rights reserved worldwide.
This page is fully compliant with W3C HTML and CSS standards: [validate HTML] | [validate CSS]
This site is hosted by pair Networks, Inc.