Colophon

Introduction

Wikipedia states: ‘In publishing, a colophon describes details of the production of a book.’. This colophon describes the details of the production of a website.

Workflow

I write the texts in a simple ASCII editor, namely Vim. After proofreading, I do the markup with a simple self-made XML syntax. The whole website is then generated automatically from that bunch of XML files using Perl and Xalan. During this there are rigid checks which often force me to repeat this step. After some manual testing, I run an automated test suite also written in Perl. It takes screenshots with a variety of browsers, and after checking the screenshots I upload the files to the server.

Software

Except for the test suite every piece of software used in the production of this website is Open Source Software. For text editing I use vim, image editing is done with The Gimp, ImageMagick and Inkscape. All automatic processing relies heavily on Perl and Apache Xalan. All pages are served from an Apache web server utilizing PHP and Perl.

Images

All images were made with Inkscape or gimp. Some automatic processing is done with ImageMagick. Some photographs were made by myself, some bought from a professional photographer. I usually use cameras from Canon.

Licences

Every resource used in the production of this website is either public domain or I own a valid licence for it. Except for the test suite every piece of software used in the production of this website is Open Source Software. The test suite uses Windows XP Home for which I have a valid licence. No embedded fonts are used currently. All images were either created by myself or I have a valid licence from the respective copyright holder.

Browser Compatibility

This website should be accessibly with any browser in the world. If you have a browser with which you are not able to read the text on this website, please contact me. I will try to fix it.

I have an automated test suite running which currently covers the following browsers:

As this website relies on CSS for styling, older browsers will show only a simple presentation of the contents. Nevertheless, all content is accessible even on the oldest browser. CSS in some browsers is severely buggy, namely Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer. The standard style sheet contains a lot of hacks to support styled presentation with Internet Explorer, because it is still in heavy use today. Netscape 4 on the other hand is a dead browser, and you will get only a simple presentation.

Standards Compliance

Every page at weinzierlweb.com is valid XHTML. Except for the default stylesheet every CSS file is valid CSS. The default stylesheet does not validate because it contains some hacks to support Internet Explorer.