| Home | Table of Contents | Please view with Internet Explorer (version 5.00 or higher) and enable scripting. For reasons, see Browsing This Web Site. |
To view this website well, particularly to navigate it with a table of contents, a few things are expected of your browser. A quick summary is that this site:
Moreover, those scripts very likely won’t work as intended, if at all, unless the browser is Internet Explorer specifically (version 5.00 or higher).
This website has existed only since January 2007, when I finally got round to realising that I ought to have a “proper” presence on the World Wide Web. The old site, from ten years earlier, was just a directory at an Internet Service Provider, having never been intended as more than a loose collection of occasional writing. Yet it had grown to something like 1500 pages, especially after two research projects which I tried to write-up-as-you-go-along. Formal help for my readers to discover all this material and find their way around it had always seemed well beyond my means. After all, I am not an HTML “author” and haven’t the slightest interest in becoming one. The best it seemed I could do was to place at the top and bottom of every page a chain of up-links through the site’s directory tree.
This truly was unreasonable of me. I myself dislike intensely those many web sites that exist to present reference material yet constrain their readers to wander from page to page with no overview easily to hand. The whole point to reference material, at least in a subject that is rich in interesting content, is that readers may connect information in ways that the author thought unlikely, or even in ways that simply never would have occurred to the author. It just does not make sense to me that each page of a large collection can be the sole guide to its relationship with other pages.
As it happens, I have gone the whole way and removed all navigational support from all document pages. Of course, where the text of a document cites something that is described in greater detail on another page, there is a link in place. Such links are surely the essence of the web. But those clumsy chains of up-links are gone, as are any links that looked like inventions of necessity.
While I write material for this web site, I have an overview always to hand, viz., a directory tree to the left of the pages that I am working on. For this new site, I have determined that a left pane with something like a directory tree is essential. Much to my surprise, it turns out that a table of contents is far from trivial for a web site, at least it is if you want useful behaviour without expecting your readers to let you execute your code on their machines. Though the old site was very near to being completely dumb, this new site does have browser requirements.
The table of contents is meant to be intuitive, but if you visit the site more than occasionally, you may gain from knowing a little more about the intended user interface, e.g., for keyboard shortcuts.
If you cannot satisfy the browser requirements, then please read about the alternate user interface so that you do at least get some navigational support.