Note: This site is new and some items below may not
reflect reality but do indicate the direction we are headed. Comments and
questions are welcome.
This site uses several innovative technologies:
- XML - some source documents are coded as XML
documents. If you are using a browser that supports XML display (i.e.,
Internet Explorer 5+ or Navigator 7+), the XML document is returned directly
to the browser, which knows to use the associated style sheet to present the
messages. If you are using a legacy browser, the transformation from XML to
straight (3.2) HTML is done on the server, so any back level browser that
supports HTML 3.2 is supported transparently.
- All pages are written using Active Server Pages, with
a few include files to handle the routine header/footer stuff. No cgi-bin code
is used on this site for efficiency. Any page elements that contain largely
similar data (e.g., page headers and footers, navigation elements, searching,
sitemaps and such) is done entirely programmatically - not lots of text
duplication and manual editing. This allows for rapid restructuring of the web
site: directory paths, document files names and such are not hardcoded for
instance.
- Most pages are sessionless, though preferences storage
and a few pages that use the preferences currently use the server's session
object.
- All presentation is separated from the data through
the use of Cascading Style Sheets. I'm not sure how I'll handle back-level
browsers yet, but target current browsers first.
- Visual Interdev 6.0 and the new .NET beta version were
used. Photoshop 6.0 and ImageReady 3.0 were used for image wizardry.
- Check out the occasional "techNote" icons you can
see on some pages (in the upper right corners) which provide more detailed
walk-throughs on the technology I'm using on these pages.
Future Plans:
- At some point I plan to write a few OLE/ActiveX/COM
(choose your de jour marketing term of choice!) components to demonstrate ATL
and VB's suitability for doing special integrated tasks easily.
- Web Services will be integrated in to a future version
of the site.
- Personalization & Mailing List & Discussion Board
