www.wang2200.org now online

After five years of accreting information into my Wang 2200 web site, Jay's generous hosting offer prodded me into action. I've revamped my web site and put everything under a new domain name: http://www.wang2200.org/ I've used xenu (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) to verify all of my links, but with 21 web pages that got converted, I could have messed up in any number of ways. If you visit and spot anything weird, please let me know. If you are still using netscape 4, sorry, the pages will look pretty bad because I'm using css to style the pages now. I've tested it under firefox, ie 6, and opera 8. The pages were designed to assume a minimum screen width of 800 pixels. Since the discussion came up on this list a few weeks ago, here is how I put my pages together. First I played around with one page and css until I was more familiar with css and had a "look" that was OK. I then converted each page, by hand, to using css and removing tables wherever they weren't necessary. Each page was validated against the w3c xhtml validator. There was still a lot of common code in all of these pages, so I wrote a perl script that reads in a "schema", containing a template plus a list of pages to apply the template to. Each page is processed and emitted to final directory. This way I can, say, change the navigation menu in the schema and it will get automatically updated in all the 21 pages that have a menu. This perl script also provides for subroutines and variable substitution so that I can define, say, a color in one place and my css and html pages can reference the variable and all get updated with the one color value. It took a couple evenings to write but I'm happy I spent the time. Thanks again Jay.