Colophon

colophon

n.

1. An inscription placed usually at the end of a book, giving facts about its publication.
2. A publisher's emblem or trademark placed usually on the title page of a book.

PushBack.com is produced entirely by hand, using the only decent Unicode text editor I have found, SC Unipad. I don’t use FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or any content management system.

It is composed according to the XHTML 1.0 Strict Web language (the successor to HTML), then formatted using CSS2.

The character set used throughout the site is the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode 3.2—an international/technical character set that is needed in order to publish better-formatted, more accurate text. The fonts used for headings is Verdana, with Arial Unicode MS used for most body test, and Andale Mono for the news blogs. The top menu is automatically rendered using your operating system’s caption font.

These design decisions mean that the site will not display as intended or operate correctly in older browsers (mainly 4.x versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer) that do not properly implement these Web standards. Any such problems can be overcome by upgrading to a better Web browser, a campaign started by the Web Standards Project.

The layout is based on that used by Jeffrey Zeldman’s A List Apart Web-design magazine, but modified with a top navigation banner that uses CSS2’s fixed positioning to keep it at the top of the browser window at all times (only in browsers that implement CSS2 correctly, such as Netscape 7+ and Opera 6+). The sidebar content that appears to the right of all pages will automatically drop down below the main content when the Web browser window is narrow enough—either because of user choice or because of the limitations of the device (as with PDAs). Most of the CSS rules are currently in one file, but I am in the process of moving the style definitions into separate files, with each being designed for a different type of display device—desktop computers, printers, and PDAs.

Many of the images on this site come from iStockPhoto, a collection of royalty-free files contributed by its members.

Metadata about each page is included using the Dublin Core standard. This metadata is used to include abstracts, keywords, created/modified dates, and a number of other details that are useful to me and to search engines.

The news content found on the homepage and Dr. Bill’s page is created and maintained using the Blogger Web log (blog) service. This allows Bill and I to easily add content from anywhere in the world we can get access to a Web browser and an Internet connection.

This page was last modified on Monday, 11-Oct-2004 20:07:03 PDT.

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