WEB: Re: SCN: new web home page

[Rod Clark]

Ken Applegate wrote:
> Has anyone noticed that "improvements" in the last 24 hours have
> rendered all the SCN web pages nearly unuseable for anyone
> viewing them with the Lynx text browser?
> 
> Yesterday, you could still see which link was currently selected
> under the cursor, using the reverse video highlighting. Tonight
> ALL links show up in reverse video, and you have no visual clue
> as to where you are on the page!
> 
> Ken
> 
> P.S. I am now going to see if our old Icomm browser still knows
> how to view SCN pages!

Ken, 

   The entire site is based on using included header and footer
files. It has been that way since last year. That's why it's so easy
to make global changes to the site now, and why all the pages stay
uniform in navigation. Any time you capture a page from your browser,
you lose all the original page source code, and instead are being fed
the finished output of the Apache include processor. This is
unfortunately what several people have been using for doing "page
maintenance" on the site. 

   The source code, which includes the virtual includes, is easy to
see with any text editor or FTP program. The only program that can
translate the source includes into the finished output that you see
in your browser is the Apache Web server. And anyone who assumes that
the output of a Web server is the original code that the server read
in before it interpreted that source code is not living in the late
1990s.

   When you say that you see things in reverse video, which
terminal emulator are you using? I'm using one that doesn't show
anything in reverse video, and the pages look perfectly fine
with it. You might try setting up your terminal emulator a bit
differently. The links are mostly standard non-bold, non-italic
links. They should show up in a reasonably good terminal
emulator as normal text of a somewhet different color. (This one
presents the links as amber text, and regular text as green
characters on a black background).

   I-Comm doesn't have to understand the include statements. It
never sees them. It's the Apache server that interprets them
into a fully assembled HTML page, not the user's browser. Every
browser sees the same HTML. The HTML that Apache sends to I-Comm
is no different from the HTML that it sends to Netscape or Lynx.

Rod


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