Production Notes

My web site has undergone some drastical redesigns since the first incarnation. Some of the considerations are praserved here.

The basic design decision is to use static HTML. No server side processing of any kind is involved. On the other side I want to keep the management of the pages to be simple.

This led to the fist generation of my Web pages. The pages where kept as XML files and build with the help of an XSLT processor.

The second generation was driven by the need to allow hyphenation – especially in the German variant. This led to a re-implementation in Perl. The input files where written in LaTeX syntax. These have been transformed into the final HTML form.

Now you see the third generation of the Web site. It is devoted to CSS3 and client-side processing. Javascript should be avoided in favour of CSS3 solutions. Some of the aspects are described below.

Responsive Design

Users may have monitors of different sizes – ranging from huge desktop computers to small mobiles. Nowadays everyone expects that all devices are producing equally good results. The name responsive design came up for a technique to adapt the appearance to the output device.

Background

One day I have discovered that the background image of my mobile phone slightly moves to produce a three-dimensional effect. Well, I could do this on my pages also...

Skrewed

I wanted the layout of the pages to be based on something different than plain old boxes. Thus I thought that some kind of skrew would be the effect to use.

Animation

Static pages are somewhat conservative – maybe too conservative for me. Thus I decided to add some animation effects. Those should mainly react to the interaction with the user.

Languages and Hyphenation

As an addict to good typography I wanted to have hyphenation in any case. I considered several posibilities and decided to do it on the client side...

Error Pages

Errors should not occur. And in case they do at least the error page should be funny...

Build and Deploy

The maintenance of the pages involves a few steps in the development environment. Since I am lazy I have automated a few things...