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About the Chipdir

Design policy for this site

Introduction

This site tries to offer information so a nice layout is not only important in helping to transmit this information better.
Therefore (and to support old browsers as much as possible) the new possibilities of new versions of the browsers are only used when they:

Let me know therefore when you have serious problems with certain aspects.

Design policy per issue

Tabulated tables

Although TAB characters caused a lot of problems with many elder browsers, they had to be used to format the lists of chips in the numerical and functional sections before tables were generally accepted by browsers.
An alternative would have been to use spaces to fill up the tabs. This would probably have been better, although it would have cost quite a lot of bandwidth.
Currently the tabulated tables need to be transformed to real HTML tables. This just hasn't been done yet.
Large tables load very slowly however, because the browser waits until the complete table has been loaded. This may require splitting the tables up in subtables per page.
The abbreviations (and some other) tables have already been split up this way.

HTML tables

Because the tab tables weren't perfect HTML tables have been introduced quite quickly in this ChipDir, although they might have caused troubles.

Back ground GIF's

This ChipDir has been using background GIF's so now and then because it was considered quite harmless and for example my NetScape 1.1 browser on a DEC Alpha had no problem with them.
I got some complaints however about them from 16-gray-scale Mac* notebookers, so I removed them again the first time.
The second time I added them I got one complaint from a Sun'er, who also had problems on other platforms. After I installed NetScape 3.0Gold on the Alpha I also got readably problems and removed it again and replaced it with a homogeneous light yellow background color.
I think that background GIF's can be nice, but obviously some systems just can't handle their palette's efficiently yet. (Probably costs a lot of screen modification time and a second shadow screen memory indeed, I think...)

Frames

I see no advantages in using frames yet.

Tables to make text columns

Although I know that text should be about 50 to 60 characters wide to be best readable, it's against the HTML philosophy to use tables to accomplish this so they aren't used in the ChipDir.

Javascript

Javascript offers a lot of advantages like search engines and possibly also gathering demographics information, but the situation isn't stable yet unfortunately, so care must be taken. Some people (and me too) had problems loading the main page on certain mirror sites. Therefore some of the earlier code (that used a separate loadable Javascript file) has been included in the page itself. When this also gives problems, the search engine will be put back in it's own separate HTML file again.

Clickable maps

Server side clickable maps (the only ones available in the beginning) have been used for a while, but most mirror sites didn't implement them (which wasn't serious) but once Europe got to many mirror sites to fit into the world map there was enough cause to remove the map. Perhaps a user side clickable map with world map and world sub maps will be reintroduced later. (Any volunteer?)

Java

A lot of the browsers don't run Java yet (and I haven't learned the language yet, so Java will not be used for some time to come).

Colors

A lot of the color information is being (or should be) ignored by ignorant browsers, so a little use of colors to liven things up a bit should be forgiven.

Tables to form colored blocks

See the experiment to form colored section headers on the magazine page.
Just waiting for comments...

Cookies

The ChipDir itself isn't using cookies yet, but some of the advertisers seem to do. Cookies are relatively innocent and can help in tracking and aiding the visitor and avoiding that he has to type in his email address and name over and over again, so they may be used later. Cookies may also be helpfull in providing information about the users demographics in order to improve the site or find suitable advertisers.

CGI-BIN

Running self written CGI-BIN script is not possible since I'm not allowed to run them on my own providers site (unless I pay much more) and because porting them to all 20 mirror sites is totally impossible.

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Site version is  Version GIF
Page last edited on 20040719
Page was never integrally checked for link correctness