Site Info

by Felix Wong | 28 Jun 1998

Site Info. My treatise on browser wars, HTML publishing, and web site design, as written in June 1998. [As of 2008, this page is totally outdated; Mozilla has superseded Netscape and this site is now mostly written in PHP. But I am keeping this page on the site because it is an interesting time capsule as to the technologies available back then.]

In 1995, I first created this website as a tribute to vintage British sports cars and ultramarathon bicycling. Noteworthy features include the world’s most comprehensive reviews of CA 100- and 200-mile bike rides, and stories “From the Logbook” of the author’s 1969 MGB.

Starting in late 1998, the site expanded to include information on my other passions of climbing and travelling. You can say the the site also functions as an online photo album and journal for myself. I do hope others find it enjoyable!

Software Requirements

This site is optimized for the latest browsers which support Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)–namely, Netscape 4.x, 6.x, and I.E. 3.x, 4.x, and 5.x. Netscape 6.x and I.E. 5.x seem to display my pages the best since they conform to the CSS standards much better than the other reasons. They also can instantly resize frames unlike Netscape 4.x and down.

As a bare minimum, you should have Netscape 2.x–the earliest version of Navigator that supports frames. Version 3.x is better since it understands the little bits of Javascript contained in this site. But the pages will look MUCH more plain with both of these versions since they don’t support CSS.

Site Design Philosophy

This is a fairly fast-loading site. The focus has been on content, not flash. Thus, java, javascript, dynamic HTML, and bandwidth-hogging graphics have been kept to a minimum. In fact, most of the graphics & images, aside from the full-size photos, are less than 6 kilobytes. And I have used Netscape’s proprietary “lowsrc” tag in few places so that low-res images will pop up while high-res ones are loading.

Furthermore, I write all the code myself, thus avoiding the pitfalls of those really inefficient what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) code-generating programs. This keeps the code compact, efficient, and readily editable.

This site also makes extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets, which save a lot of code since formatting styles need to be only defined once for all of my pages. It saves me a lot of work and keeps all styles within my site uniform. And starting in early 2001, I have implemented CGI scripts and server-side includes (SSI) to keep formatting consistent and to make future maintenance of the site as quick, efficient, and easy as possible.

The Author

I am actually a mechanical-engineer and not a professional coder–web page design is just one of my hobbies. I started this site back in the days of Mosaic. It’s one of the ways I relax while stimulating brain cells and recording nostalgic memoirs of my life. And to share useful and entertaining info with others, I hope!