Preparing this Set of Papers

To some extent, it is also an experiment to explore the possibilities of further Web publications from these meetings. Consequently, it is worth recording some of the possibilities considered before settling on the present format.

Objectives

• A consistent style through most of the papers leads to a feeling of cohesion and uniformity.
• The pages should easily used.
• They should be easily prepared.

• Each author would send in their text as a Word document, and also as a Web document, if able.
  This was reasonable and most of the documents sent in could be easily handled. However, a number had used Word to produce the HTML code and this was more difficult to fiddle around with. (In some places I edited out the extraneous pieces the Word converter likes to add.) This was easier than preparing the documents myself, from Word, because I received with the Web file a complete set of images.
• I experimented with thumbnail images, to clean up the look of the text. It did, but it meant the text could no longer be printed and referred to as it no longer contained figures.

• Mostly, default settings were used to produce a reasonably consistent, homogeneous set of papers for the Web. A background colour was added (aside from looking poor, grey is out-of-date and white is a little bright), and headings were treated individually.
• Figures, in many cases, were scaled to WIDTH=100% of the page, where it was possible. While some figures became rather large, this preserved detail and allows large screens, and especially printers, to use their full capacity. HEIGHT was not entered, which HTML validators complained about, but the browser tests suggested it was peritted. However, this means the pages may take longer to display, even with interlaced gifs. An ALT was added to figures when I remembered, but equations need them also. Let me know if you suffered because of that decision.
• All pages were viewed on Netscape (3.0, 4.?) and Internet Explorer 4 in a PC environment and a UNIX environment.
  To satisfy netscape 3.0, all file names were kept of 8.3 characters and to satisfy UNIX, case was kept constant (Next time, I'll use lower case everywhere, even if support for old browsers seems pointless.) The Homesite validator was run on the text and errors corrected. Warnings were generally ignored.

I welcome your comments and advice on what I might have done. For instance, one obvious change would be to use cascading style sheets.