A colophon is an inscription placed at the end of a book or manuscript containing facts about its production. This site has some unique features worth mention.

Viewed with a CSS2 compliant browser—such as Netscape 7.01, Mozilla 1.2, Opera or Phoenix 0.5—this site has a fixed navigation bar on the left. If you visit the Why? page you can see it in action: scroll down and watch the nav bar. Mozilla leaves it always visible, helping you move from page-to-page wherever you scrolled. Because Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 does not implement "fixed positioning," it scrolls the nav bar off the screen. I used a stylesheet trick to make IE consider the nav bar "absolute" while more advanced browsers consider it "fixed".

CSS2-compliant browsers will show the first paragraph of each page without indent. I implemented this with another CSS2 feature, pseudo-class :first-child. Again, IE users will not see this.

I tried to create a highly readable font scheme. The navigation aids—nav bar, title, header lines—are rendered in a bold sans serif font, usually Arial. The body text is rendered in Georgia, a font designed for screen pixels. Georgia's dropped numerals lend interest to the text and serifs improve fatigue-free readability at small point sizes.

If you are using Netscape, Mozilla or Opera, you may not see Georgia correctly rendered. In the string "96", the 9 should drop below the 6. If not, your text is likely rendered in Times New Roman. Try downloading and installing Georgia from here, extract the 4 TrueType files into a temporary directory, then drag them to the Fonts control panel. Why does it work automatically in IE? Because I instrumented this site to download Georgia if not already on your computer. That behavior is standard in CSS2, but only IE supports it.

I designed this site for screens with 800×600 pixels or more. However, even old browsers should present this site acceptably.

The site is designed for low-bandwidth and fast rendering. This page's source file contains no format information, which consumes bandwidth. Instead, they link to shared stylesheet and font files. <p> tags inside the <div.body> block get rendered in Georgia, with the spacing you see here. <p> tags inside the <div.nav> block get rendered in Arial, with no inter-paragraph space. This reduces bandwidth requirements, because your browser downloads the stylesheet only once for many pages.

All modern browsers should display the title and body text rapidly and before the navigation bar, rather than waiting for the whole page to load. That is because this site uses <div> tags with absolute positioning to separate major page components, rather than <table> tags.

The Contact page refers to a vCard that can be downloaded directly into most contact managers. That vCard required some configuration of MIME types on Apache 2.0 web server, which at least partly explains why more people don't put vCards on their web sites.

This site was developed with Dreamweaver MX, a professional web design tool produced by my former employer, Macromedia. Fonts were encoded using Microsoft WEFT. The site uses the XHTML 1.0 Transitional language, making it XML compliant.