This web-site has been designed with the brilliant Opera and Mozilla browsers in mind. It will work with Micros**t’s Internet Explorer version 4.0 and higher, he said grudgingly, but it’ll look quite squashed up because I’m not going to put in a lot of margins and things just for some crap software from planet Earth’s equivalent of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation (“they’ll be first against the wall when the revolution comes”).
The site uses ‘cascading style sheets’ (CSS) to give a consistent look across all the pages, but the main one will only need to be downloaded once, unless you have switched off local cacheing. I’ve gone for quite a chunky look to these pages because of the white background (see below). If you’re running Windows 98, NT or XP, the main headings should appear in a rather nice (I think) titling face called ‘Matura MT Script capitals’, which liven things up a bit, otherwise you’ll have to put up with the rather foursquare variants of Arial.
HTML tables are used in many places to get useful layouts, but as the pages are mostly text – so they ought to load nice and fast whatever the speed of your link – and the tables are usually separate for each section, you shouldn’t have to wait too long for the start of the page to display. There are graphics now on the albums and singles descriptions, so if you’ve got a slow link use the single page text version of the discography for quick queries.
Because I like real quote-marks, both single and double, I have used quite a number of the non-conforming special characters, (beginning &#) but unless you’ve got a particularly old or idiosyncratic browser this shouldn’t cause you any problems.
Javascript is used to change the status bar on your browser when the pointer is over a link (see next section) and on the Honeychildren mailing-list subscribe page, where it places the cursor in the email-name box (if you’ve enabled it!). Otherwise nothing fancy happens and, in an attempt at HTML 3.2 standards, I have refrained from converting the site to a frames based one!
Because of the large number of cross-links in the discography and related pages you may like to turn off the link underlining in your Browser set-up options. This will make my pages look far less cluttered.
I have deliberately chosen a colour scheme for these pages that is reminiscent of the graphic work on Eddi’s 1996 album Candyfloss and Medicine, which was designed by M @ Maitland. The basic colours are maroon and orange on white, with black text; if you want to see the original, go out and buy the album - you won’t regret it.
Unless you have set your browser to keep to its own colours, links from the pages will be in maroon and visted links (that is, links to pages you have already looked at) will be in orange. To keep the colour scheme in harmony, the page headings and some of the sub-headings are also in these colours: however, they do not act as links, largely because, as headings, they don’ need to, but of course, if they did, they would change colour when you had visited the page to which each refers.
I know that if you have followed my suggestion (above) of turning off the link underline option on your browser, this might cause confusion occasionally – as someone became famous for saying, “the medium is the message” – but you can always keep an eye on the browser’s status bar now that I have added JavaScript control of this. My justification is that it produces a consistent look without recourse to graphics which take ages to down-load. And wouldn’t life be boring if it was always predictable? Just remember, if it doesn’t take you anywhere when you click on it, it’s not a link!
are in ISO8601 format, by the way.
happy browsing...
Adrian Dover, January 2003
you may wish to return to the Honeychildren menu or to the Honeychildren introduction