Introduction: Upgrade & facilities

Intro This page mainly addresses some upfront technical issues regarding browser compatibility and the site upgrade. See synopsis page for the website content introduction.

The upgrading of this site has only been tested against the latest versions of the most popular browsers, e.g. IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Early versions or untested browsers may not render the correct format, e.g. IE6 is known to have several display problems, which seem to be mostly corrected by IE7. Initial testing with Firefox, Chrome, Safari seems OK, as does Opera when run on the on-line system rather than my local development copy. I have also done some testing on 15" and 17" laptop screens to check for size reformatting via CSS, which seems to be OK. While the site might work on smaller screen sizes, no testing has been done and to some extent the pictures are essentially sized for a minimum 15" screen.

As stated on the home page, this site is in the process of being upgraded from an earlier version. This process has required that all the pages, nearly 500, be reformatted and essentially re-written. Of the 7 sections listed across the horizontal menu bar above, most are now operational with the exceptions of the Science and Research sections, which only have top-level pages.

Therefore, it is possible that you have tried to wander around this site, via the various navigation menus, only to find that some of its pages in the science and research sections are mostly blank. While this will be addressed as soon as possible, the main purpose of this introduction page is to outline the intended operation of the 3 navigation options, which all depend on client-side Javascripts being enabled:

Top bar section menu
Upper inset left positional menu
Bottom inset left tree menu

The top-level horizontal bar menu is intended to guide you to the start of a major discussion section via dropdown selection options. Then, once at an appropriate starting point, the upper left inset menu provides relative positional navigation. which can display up to 5 possible options: home, up, next, previous and down.

In contrast, the bottom left inset menu provides navigation to the tree structure of the entire site. The following sub-options allow the tree menu display to be tailored to a given area of interest, which is then preserved, via a cookie, when switching between pages:

Open/All will expand the entire tree, which is probably too long for most practical use, but can be immediately reversed via the Close/All option.
An alternative approach is to enter the <section> number as reflected in the top bar menu and then clicking the radio button. In a similar fashion, the required <depth> can be controlled via the second radio button.

Regarding the upgrade process itself, the site was originally developed and maintained using Microsoft Frontpage, but Microsoft as effectively made this product obsolete, therefore an alternative development approach had to be considered. However, the upgrade process still needs to convert all the information, originally developed via Frontpage, into a new standards compliant format. Unfortunately, no easy automated method has been found that will allow the wholesale transfer of the original Frontpage generated HTML pages into the new HTML/CSS standards format. This process has also been made more problematic due to the original dependency on the built-in web navigation facilities offered by the now obsolete Frontpage. While a manual system of HTML links could have been implemented to provide web navigation, this approach appeared to require excessive maintenance for a site approaching 500 pages. For this reason, the site has essentially be re-written to a new format.

It is also hoped that the new format will address a number of requirements in terms of finding information. First, it is hoped that the navigation options, as described above, will allow topics to be indexed and accessed in a logical manner. However, it is realised that the dependency on Javascripts may be problematic to whose who have disabled this option due to security concerns, although so much content now depends on Javascripts being enabled, it is hoped that this will not be a major problem. In addition to the content navigation, there is an extended tree index provided in the form of a Sitemap, which can also be accessed via Site Services. You can also search for specific keywords or topics via the Site Search facility and, as such, it is hoped that information of interest can be more easily found.

With these operational issues outlined, the site synopsis may provide an alternative starting point for visitors wishing to understanding the rationale behind the site, as a whole, as well as providing some initial links into the various levels of discussion. Alternatively you may simply expand the tree menu, via the inset left, or via the sitemap, to see a description of all the site pages.