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About the Web Pages

The original version of the CSSE web pages was created between November 1999 and February 2000. This document discusses some of the decisions made with respect to both the design and implementation of the web pages at that time.

The Design

Requirements

The design of the web pages was stipulated by the Registry. In summary the design guidelines were:

1. A link to the University home page should be on every Departmental page. The University logo was recommended as the link.
2. The Department name should be at the top of the page.
3. There should be a grey navigation bar down the left-hand side of the page.

The latter two guidelines were compulsory for the departmental home page, and optional (but recommended) for the underlying pages.

In addition to the design principles put forward by the Registry, the Department had a number of underlying design requirements.

1. No Frames, as they are problematic for text-based browsers (such as Lynx) and can be difficult for graphical browsers (with bookmarking, and images).
2. Few images. Not everyone has a T1 line, and images are kept to a minimum, to allow quick browsing.
3. Consistency. A consistent look-and-feel should be given to the pages, so users can develop an intuition about the structure of the site.
4. No Javascript. Most of the problems associated with images are also associated with Javascript.
5. The pages should look good no matter what size window they are viewed in. There are many sized screens in CSSE, and the pages should be able to be viewed in all of them. (For future reference they were first viewed in a 600x900 window.)

The Implementation

The main university pages make use of frames to divide the page into sections, and images for the buttons in the navigation bar, and main page header. This was in conflict with the first two principals for the CSSE pages. The solution to dividing the page into sections was to use tables, which are well supported in most browsers, unlike CSS, that are more desirable.

Style sheets were used to implement the title, and buttons in the navigation bar, and most other colour and typeface variations. The original idea for using style sheets came from the Department of Sociology , who also used a table to arrange the layout of the pages. There are issues with the navigation bar: such as not having underlining to indicate that it is a link, but that was a decision taken by Registry not Computer Science.

The style sheet also cleaned up the HTML by removing the <font> tags, and made it easy for the various authors to create pages that fitted the CSSE `house style'.

Sans-serif headers were chosen because the person implementing the pages liked left-aligned, sans-serif headers. The background image was taken from the old version of the site, as it looks quite nice and distinguishes the CSSE site from other pages.

The navigation bar was implemented using SSI, which allowed modification of the navigation bar to be easily propagated through the site.

The web pages are coded to HTML 4.0 Transitional. The reason the transitional version of HTML 4.0 is used (instead of strict) is the navigation bar down the left-hand side of the page is coloured grey by using the bgcolor attribute of the table. This allows graceful degradation of the page for users of old (pre version 4) browsers, who would not be able to easily distinguish the navigation bar from the rest of the text.

The source code of the pages is also formatted nicely. The main reason for this is that this is to allow students to learn HTML from reading the source code of the site.

Problems

The pages do tend to look the same. This problem was partly overcome by adding some small pictures to some of the pages (such as the class pages). These pictures were created by Matt Powell, the CSSE resident artist, and went some way to alleviating the problems of all pages looking the same.