New Site Design

Announcement

The new design incorporates a new visual layout as well as a totally new mechanism for publishing web pages.

New technology, new appearance, updated feedback application and news headlines from other news sites promise to be exciting features on this web site.

New Technology

We have adopted new technologies to generate our web pages.

Technologies such XML (Extensible Mark-up Language), XSL (XML Style-sheet Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have been used to produce our web pages.

The use of these technologies allow us to separate content from presentation. By separating content from presentation we are able to focus on each section without affecting the other.

New Appearance

For those who are viewing this site with a CSS enabled browser will of course get to see all of the new design elements in the web pages.

With good design policies we have produced pages that are still well formed with non-CSS capable browsers.

This is still one of the major design criteria we have adopted for the production our web pages. A lot of effort was spent on developing a good design that is pleasant to view with all major web browsers.

Feedback Page Improved

The CGI application that drives the feedback page has been upgraded to use the new technology.

One of the benefits of the upgrade was to allow the feedback application to remember the data previously entered if there was an error in the page.

Another benefit is that maintenance of the page layout is done using XSL style sheets. So if there is a change in the layout, the feedback application does not have to be upgraded because of a layout design change.

Speed

The World Wide Web is quickly becoming the World Wide Wait.

Our web site does not suffer from the bottle necks that other web sites have. We do not use a database to serve every page requested, all pages are in final form ready to be serve to people's browsers.

Sites that use a database to serve pages require very powerful equipment to be able to serve the pages particularly during a heavy loads - often they don't. Compounding this other sites do not even change the contents of their webs pages frequently - what a waste!

We serve all of our pages directly with the Apache web server - this keeps our cost down and allows us to have a scalable web server.