Site Design / Tech Info
This site is written to be HTTP 4.01 Transitional and CSS compliant. The site uses CSS to organize and present all content. You will notice at the bottom of every page, the footer contains two linked images. Clicking on these will open a new window to validation scripts for that particular page; one which will validate the page's HTML content, and the other will validate the CSS content. These tools are provided by the World Wide Web Consortium, a resource to help developers create standards-compliant documents.
The site markup (both CSS and HTML) is written by hand using a text editor called EditPlus. The front page news and archives are generated by Movable Type. All aircraft data, team data, and university data is stored in a MySQL database. All templated content on this site (Hangar university pages, individual team pages, Podium pages, etc) are generated by a custom perl script which "fills in the blanks" so to speak. Our forums are driven by phpBB, an open source bulletin board system.
Most pages on this site will look 'okay' at a screen resolution of 800 x 600, however 1024 x 768 or higher would be better. For your browsing enjoyment, we highly recommend Mozilla Firefox as an alternative to the 'standard' Internet Explorer. Without getting all soap boxy, Firefox has many advantages over IE; the major ones being tabbed browsing support and popup blocking. Additionally, it is open source and supports add-ons and improved features by way of extensions. Also, Firefox renders CSS properly, whereas Internet Explorer does not. So if you haven't heard of Firefox, we suggest downloading it and giving it a shot. Once you learn what it's capable of, we think you'll like it.
Oh, and what about that spiffy navbar? Tech-wise, it's a CGI script written in perl, one of my favorite coding languages. To go into a bit more detail, let's talk about navigational displays. First, there's the breadcrumb navigation style. This shows you how deeply nested within a site (or group of folders) you are, as well as showing each sublevel back to the root. Second, there's tree-style navigation (like Windows Explorer). This style of navigation shows all sublevels, but highlights the area you're currently in. Our navbar is a combination between the two. I dub it a "breadcrumb tree" and hope that you find it both useful and intuitive.
You also have probably noticed the advertisements sprinkled around the site. We thought carefully about whether or not to put ads on the site, and decided that these unobtrusive Google ads would not detract from the site's content. If you see anything that interests you on the ads, we'd of course appreciate some clicks. If you find any of the ads objectionable, please email us and we'd be happy to discuss it.
