About Mevyap.com

General Information

The Author

Jeff Paulson is a software engineer in Atlanta, Georgia, who specializes in:

For more details, click here.

The Website

Within the Reference section is the main content of this site. It is broken down by domain within the field of software development. Each category has links to original articles and reference guides.

The Versions page is a quick reference to a number of open-source, freeware, and cottage industry software tools that I use at least occasionally. Its purpose is to help in keeping development tools at their current release. Each tool referenced has a description, its current release number, and a link to its download site.

The Links page is a conglomeration of all the links found in the reference section, plus a few more to cover some of my hobbies and topics of general interest. These lists are not meant to be comprehensive — that is what search engines are for. Redundant sites and those with low signal to noise ratios are likely to be pruned.

Finally, there is the Games page. I'll admit that the games in here are rather dull, but the point isn't the playing, it's the writing. This is essentially a sandbox for learning DHTML.

Email your comments or suggestions here.

Design Considerations

Browser Compatibility

This site generally appears best when viewed in Internet Explorer 6 or Netscape Navigator 7.1. These are the two browsers on my home workstation. I don't even have IE 5.5 on my alternate machine any more; I formatted the drive and installed Linux. Once I have it connected to my LAN, I'll add a couple other browsers to the list.

Except for the games where it's used heavily, I've tried to keep scripting to a minimum. I do, however, reserve the right to experiment. I also have managed to avoid most of the new features in CSS 2, mainly due to IE's general lack of support.

(By the way, I recently learned that Internet Explorer is now considered by Microsoft to be an end-of-life product. Support by Microsoft for CSS 2 will have to wait for the next major release of Windows, expected to be released in 2005 or 2006.)

HTML 4.01 Strict DTD

All of the pages in this site (this version of it, anyway) are in compliance with the HTML 4.01 Strict specification. Using the strict standard conveys a number of benefits, most of which accrue to the author. Site development and maintenance time are reduced because all presentation markup has been factored out into style sheets. I can change the look and feel of the entire site by updating a single file. True, I could have done that before with any sloppy old HTML and a stylesheet, but it's amazing how quickly those color and typeface elements creep back in if you don't validate your pages.

The advantages for you are that the pages are smaller and download faster, a consistent look and feel makes a site easier to navigate, and there's less chance that something on this site will cause your browser to misbehave.

One thing is certain; if there are any problems with how this site appears in your browser, I can make a pretty strong case against your browser. If you're using Netscape, you should be using version 6 or newer. Older versions of Netscape provided little support for style sheets. The latest versions are based on a new cross-platform browser engine called Gecko, whose support for standards is considerably better. Internet Explorer users can probably get away with using version 5.5, but 6 is better. I have limited hardware for testing my site against other browsers. If you are using another browser and you see something that doesn't look right, please let me know.

Browser-Safe Colors

The RGB color encoding scheme allows for each of the Red, Green and Blue components of a color to have an integer value between zero and 255. 256 cubed is 16,777,216, which is a few more colors than your average person can come up with names for. Unfortunately, many computers aren't able to display that many.

There are 216 colors considered "safe", meaning that just about any computer -- even in low graphics modes -- should be able to render them without having to dither. For now, I've chosen to limit all text and backgrounds on this site to browser-safe colors.

Composition

I imagine there are as many coding styles for HTML as there are websites, and I think I've tried most of them. As alluded to earlier, the content and layout are contained in web pages and all markup affecting presentation is in stylesheets.

There are many ways of grouping content and controlling layout. I'm limited by having no control over the server; no ASP, no PHT, no server-side includes. I've avoided the use of tables and invisible bitmap spacing partly because they're hacks, but more importantly, they wreak havoc on some browsers, especially non-traditional browsers, like cell phones, PDAs and aural browsers (screen readers).

On this site, the general layout is determined by the structure of the individual web page. That which can't be done through simple sequencing or nesting is done through the use of div and span tags. All margins, padding, and other spacing is done through the application of styles.

At one time, I did flirt with a two-column layout with dynamic menus, etc. As A user, I found that I prefer simple one-column pages. They print better and they're easier on your eyes. A simple site menu at the top of the page will suffice if the website has a shallow structure. Remember that most users lose interest if they have to drill down more than three levels.

Accessibility

I tried to make this site accessible to those with impaired vision. Text and background colors were chosen so that contrast wasn't sacrificed in the interest of aesthetics. Most images and links have alternate text for non-graphical browsers.

If your browser is configured for accessibility (and assuming you're using the latest version of your browser), this site should still look pretty similar to the way I designed it. I experimented with the font size and color overrides in IE 6 and it seemed OK. I'm sure you could come up with a user stylesheet that would make it look lousy, but I think you would have to put some time into it. If it really does look bad on your system, send me a note telling me the name and version of your browser and any accessibility settings you may have applied.

Web Hosting

This site is hosted by Yahoo!. For $12/month, I get 10 MB of space on their server, 5 email accounts (aliased to Yahoo email accounts), FTP access, 10 subdomains, and the ability to password-protect folders within the site. They also provide several utilities, but I don't use them; if you want nice clean code, use a text-based editor. There are other good features too, but I haven't had time to explore them.

The major downside to using Yahoo! is that I can't run any code on the server. No ASP, PHP, .NET, or even server-side includes. That matter aside, my only complaint is that in support of their statistics gathering, they add code to the end of every page you visit. This code is not compliant with any of the HTML 4.01 DTDs, which is the only reason I can't plaster the compliant logo all over my site.