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About the HomePage that Ant made on a Mac

Built with BBEdit

Most of these pages have been built – and all have been “mastered” – using BBEdit (BBEdit Lite 4.1, BBEdit 6.0.2, BBEdit 6.5.2, and, most recently, BBEdit 8.2.1) on a Mac. Originally I was using a lime Apple iMac DV running Mac OS 8.6 and Mac OS X ― Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger since 21 May 2005. Since May 2006, I’ve been using a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo iMac.

Some pages had been “prototyped” using other software, namely:

• On Windows 95 & 98:
  • Microsoft Word 97
  • Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0.2
• On Mac OS:
  • Adobe PageMill 3.0

Yes, I really did use Word… this was all that was available too me when I was editing the Software Europe pages. In general, I was unhappy with PageMill: the HTML it generates is quite messy (although it’s not as bad as Word!), and it doesn’t recognise cascading style sheets. FrontPage is even worse, replacing HTML special characters that it doesn’t recognise with question marks! Maybe it’s the hacker in me, but I prefer to edit the “raw” HTML with BBEdit!

Design notes

The design of the early versions of these pages on GeoCities (August 2000) was heavily influenced by Erik Max Francis’s pages: each page was essentially a large table. However, Erik’s approach didn’t fit very well with the cascading style sheets (CSS) I was already using, and the resulting HTML was rather messy – “neither nowt nor summat”, as they say in Yorkshire – and didn’t degrade elegantly (e.g., giving rise to pages with black text on dark coloured backgrounds).

In the next version of the pages (in a new directory on GeoCities), I was aiming for compliance with HTML 4.01 (“loose” – checked with BBEdit) and CSS 1. I got rid of the one-big-table approach, which gave the pages a rather more “open” look due to wider vertical spacing between the elements (at least, on IE 4.5 and IE 5). I also chose to eschew Erik’s white text on black backgrounds for black on white, which I’ve retained. It might be more conventional, but, I think, gives the pages a “crisper” look.

For the first version of these pages on homepage.mac.com/antallan/, I exercised more control over the display of the pages by re-introducing tables, this time with a fixed width, with a subtle background to fill in wider browser windows.

The current .mac version of the pages has been influenced by NN/g’s usability guidelines. But, following Eric Costello and others, I’ve done “the right thing” by using cascading style sheets (CSS) to handle the page layout rather than tables. (I’m still using tables for tables qua tables, though!)

The downside of this is that browser support for CSS is variable, so what you see might not be what I intended…

“Preferred” fonts

My preferences (encoded in the style-sheet font-family statements) are:

• sans-serif (body text, etc.):
  

     font-family: "Lucida Sans",
                  Helvetica,
                  Arial,
                  sans-serif ;

• monospaced (code, etc.):
  

     font-family: Monaco,
                  "Lucida Sans Typewriter",
                  "Courier New",
                  Courier,
                  monospaced ;
  

• specialist (IPA, etc.):
  

     font-family: Gentium,
                  serif ;
  

Lucida Sans is a widely available font. I’ve adopted it for all text – where before I was using Lucida Grande for headings and Gentium for body text – to improve readability at small font sizes, especially on some LCD screens. Lucida Sans has an italic style that Lucida Granda lacks, and a very elegant one too.

Monaco is a standard font on Mac OS X.

Gentium – freely available from SIL – is a crisp, elegant font, with a very readable italic style, and has broad Unicode support.

For those without those fonts installed, here’s what they look like…

Lucida Sans: The sample text I’m using here is the standard “Lipsum” – see Lorem Ipsum.

Gentium: With a repetoire of IPA symbols.

Monaco: Part of a Cocoa “Hello, World” program.

Pronunciation

Phonetics are indicated using both IPA and X-SAMPA transcriptions.