Introduction

I explain all the steps involved in creating, designing, hosting and maintaining my web pages.

Content and Graphic Design

Content is the most important, but your web page should be pleasant to read. I use the design advice in Learning Web Design, 4th Edition, A Beginner's Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics by Jennifer Niederst Robbins

Responsive Web Design is a collection of fluid techniques which make web pages look good on both mobile or laptop screens. CSS tools such as flexboxes and grids are a big part of fluid positioning. Web browsers have built-in developer tools which simulate different mobile and laptop screens.

I've used Mathematica to create graphic designs for my web pages and business cards.

Directory Structure

The main web page index.html goes in the top level directory. All other items are sorted into subdirectories. For example, images go into directories named /Images. Image files are of type .png or .jpg.

Hypertext

Web pages are written in HTML 5 using guidance from the book Diving into HTML 5 with occasional use of unicode I edit pages with the Vim text editor for which I've written simple vim scripts to help edit html and css. I do a final check on each html file using validate from W3C's service.

Javascript

I use Javascript in my web pages. The Javascript language has no classes, inheritance, constructors or instances; there are only objects and delegation along the prototype chain. The commonly used constructor function + new pattern is very misleading and unnecessarily complex. So forget classes+instances and read about prototypal object oriented programming and prototypes and performance for an introduction. Then read this series of books which explain basic JS concepts. Many textbooks like the excellent Eloquent JavaScript. use the syntactic sugar which makes JS appear to be an OO language like C++ when itst core behavior is very different.

Style Sheets

My documents use CSS level 3 + SVG style sheets. I have one CSS style sheet for all my documents, which I validate. you can see an example of using styles in my HTML file webPageDesign.html

You can use Firefox's web developer tools Tools ➤ Browser Tools ➤ Web Developer Tools ➤ Inspector to debug your CSS stylesheet. You can point to HTML elements and see which style get inherited from which selectors.

Server Side

My server uses Apache. Here are some server side fixups and optimizations which go into the .htaccess. file which in the top level directory of the web site.

1. Specify a personal error 404 page for broken links and test it out here
2. My host's Apache web server didn't recognize the C language header .h and Mathematica .nb file file types and was not allowing access to the files. So I added the file extension type into my top-level .htaccess file on the server,
3. Server compresses web file types before sending. The client side browsers will decompress it.
4. Server tells browsers to cache files locally for faster page loading.

I use FileZilla ftp to manually upload the .htaccess file. I upload all rest of the files with my Python script updateweb.py And here are some additional Tips and Tricks for my server.

Basics

Top margin is from the bottom of this line to the dashed border below. Left margin is from edge of page (the body) to the left dashed border.

This is a paragraph illlustrating contents, padding, border and margin. Contents is white text with a blue background. Padding surrounds the contents and is the same color as the background. Padding extends into the light red dashed border by default. Margin surrounds the border and is transparent. I've turned on outlining (green dotted line) to show where the border ends and the margin begins.

This is a paragraph illlustrating contents, padding, border and margin. Contents is white text with a blue background. Padding surrounds the contents and is the same color as the background. I've turned on outlining (green dotted line) to show where the border ends and the margin begins.
But now padding stops short of the border since added the CSS style modifier <p class="example" style="background-clip: padding-box;"> Margin surrounds the border and is transparent. I've turned on outlining (green dotted line) to show where the border ends and the margin begins.

Bottom margin from above this line to the dashed border.

Headers

<h1 class="stylish">Stylish Header</h1>

<h2>h2 header</h2>

<h3>h3 header</h3>

<h4>h4 header</h4>

<h5>h5 header</h5>

<h6>h6 header</h6>

Email

me if you have questions or comments.

Navigation

Hyperlinks

• Hyperlink to this page itself. Hover over the link to see the tooltip!

Note that tooltips only work on devices which support hover, e.g. computers with mouse, stylus or trackpad. They are not supported on mobile devices right now.

Inline Styles

Fonts and Font Styles

serif ⧫ san-serif ⧫ monospace ⧫ cursive ⧫ fantasy

<i> italic text </i>
<strong> strong text </strong>
<small> small text </small>
<mark> colored marker </mark>
<s>strike out </s>

HTML Entities - for example ∮ &ContourIntegral; ∞ &infin; ⋯ &ctdot;

Emphasized Text

<h3>h3 header</h3> <em class="warning">emphasized text in header</em>

<h3>h3 header</h3> <em class="caution">emphasized text in header</em>

Pseudocode

Colors

<span style="color: white; background-color: var(--warm-brown);">warm-brown<span>

Paragraph Styles

Illustrated Paragraph

Spaced out Paragraph

This paragraph of class "spacedout" has larger font and more vertical space between previous and next paragraphs. "Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature." -Albert Einstein

Paragraph with Floating Figure

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Block quote

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. Groucho Marx

Boxed Paragraph

"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science." -Albert Einstein

Paragraph with Change Bar

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” ― Edgar Degas
“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.” ― Oscar Wilde

Footnote Paragraph

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” - Oscar Wilde

Fine Print Paragraph

"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." -Ludwig Wittgenstein

Lists

• Unordered list
• img within a list

1. Ordered list
2. Ordered list

• Unordered list
• Unordered list
• Unordered list

• Unordered list
• Unordered list
• Unordered list

Scroll Box

We have the classes scrollBox, scrollBoxTiny, scrollBoxSmall, scrollBoxMedium, scrollBoxLarge, scrollBoxHuge. The default is scrollBox, which are around 12 em high. scrollBoxTiny is used for single lines, and scrollBoxHuge is used when we want to see most of the text and not have to scroll up and down so much.

Images

Centered images, from full width to smaller sizes.

Tables

Tooltips

Note that tooltips only work on devices which support hover, e.g. computers with mouse, stylus or trackpad. They are not supported on mobile devices right now.

Here is an example tooltip modified a lot from creating beautiful tooltips using CSS using the following HTML5 and CSS3+ technologies:

• static, relative, absolute and sticky position
• layout and contiaing blocks
• :before and :after pseudo-classes
• custom data attributes

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Most of the magic is in the CSS style sheet.

Art Gallery

An art gallery.

Fast PC

3D eye

2D eye

Home

Movies

Forms

Form push button example showing my layout style and a very simple callback

SVG

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a language for describing vector graphics. See the Mozilla SVG Tutorial

I use Inkscape to do the drawing and generate the SVG file. Here's an example, where I've drawn a picture in Inkscape, and saved it to an *.svg file. Load the *.svg image as you would any image, except I have background: transparent; in the style sheet so the SVG draws on top of the page, just like a drawing on paper. Thus the image size fills the containing box (this paragraph) and resizes with the browser window.

Yoicks by Sean Erik O'Connor is licensed under the Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0

Canvas

Canvas Specification

Google Search

Typesetting Mathematics

Math on the Web

I use MathJax to typeset equations. I write equations in $\LaTeX$ in both inline or display style, using single or double dollar sign delimiters. Here's the wonderful Not So Short Introduction to LATEX

For example, the Navier-Stokes equation is ${{V} \over { \partial t }} + \left( V \bullet \nabla \right) V = {{ - \nabla p} \over { \rho_0}} + \nu \triangle V + F$, $\quad \nabla \bullet V = 0$, $\quad V |_{\partial \Omega} = 0$.

The Frobenius norm is $\| A \|_2 \equiv \sum_{ij} | A_{ij} |^2 \equiv \sqrt { tr( A^T A ) }$. and the error function is defined to be $ \operatorname{erfc}(x) = \frac{2}{\sqrt{\bar{\pi}}} \int_x^{\infty} e^{-t^2}\,dt = \frac{e^{-x^2}}{x\sqrt{\pi}}\sum_{n=0}^\infty (-1)^n \frac{(2n)!}{n!(2x)^{2n}} $

The Frechet derivative of a vector norm, $$ Df(x)h = \lim_{t \rightarrow 0} { { f( x + t h) - f(x) } \over {t} } $$ $$ = \lim_{t \rightarrow 0} { { \sqrt{ {\| x \|}^2 + 2 \lt x | t h \gt + {\| t h \|}^2 } - \| x \|} \over {t} } $$

A circulant matrix equation, $$ \left( \begin{array} { cccccc } a^{sn} & a^{s(n-1)} & \ldots & a^s & 1 \\ a^{s(n+1)} & a^{sn} & \ldots & a^{s+1} & a^s \\ \ldots \\ a^{s(2n)} & a^{s(2n-1)} &\ldots & a^{s(n+1)} & a^{sn} \end{array} \right) X = \left( \begin{array} { c } c_{n} \\ c_{n-1} \\ \ldots \\ c_0 \end{array} \right) $$

a Fourier transform sum, $$ \sum_{k_0=0}^1 \sum_{k_1=0}^1\ldots \sum_{k_{g-1}=0}^1 \quad \times $$ $$ \bar{x}(k_{g-1}, k_{g-2}, \ldots , k_0) \quad \times $$ $$ W^{ (n_0) (2^{g-1}k_{g-1})} W^{(2 n_1 + n_0) (2^{g-2}k_{g-2})} W^{(2^{g-1} n_{g-1} + \ldots + n_0) (k_0)} $$

and a normalized cross-correlation, $$ P = \frac{\displaystyle{ \sum_{i=1}^n (x_i- x) (y_i- y)}} {\displaystyle{\left[ \sum_{i=1}^n(x_i-x)^2 \sum_{i=1}^n(y_i- y)^2 \right]^{1/2}}} $$ Update form for mean, $$ M_{n+1}= {{\sum_{i=1}^{n+1} x_i} \over {n+1}} ={M_n } {n \over n+1} + {x_{n+1} \over {n+1}} $$

MathJax will show you the source code for the equation with a right click over the equation, or you can set hover to show the equation source.

Setting up MathJax

To set up MathJax for your web page, put this into your <head> section before loading the style sheet,

Put this script into your /Scripts directory which configures and loads MathJax in three different ways:

• From MathJax files in the /mathjax directory on my local development platform (MacBook Pro).
• From MathJax files in the /mathjax directory on my web host (after uploading the directory to my web host).
• Otherwise from CDN URL for MathJax.

• load-mathjax.js
• Load MathJax Javascript.
• View
• Download

Not happening now, but this used to happen with a 2018 version of MathJax:

I was getting timeouts loading the italic font from my server, but not for my local web page on my MacBook Pro host. So I added the following .htaccess file in mathjax/fonts which fixed the problem. My Apache web server didn't recognize the .woff font file type and was not allowing access to the files as explained in Apache how to for htaccess.

Maintainance

In the top level directory, I have a Python script called updateweb.py which maintains this site. Some of its features:

• Automatic generation of syntax highlighted source code listings.
• Automatic search and replace any type of text (e.g. old copyright notices) in all hypertext and source files.
• Delete temporary files and directories generated by compilers.
• Upload the changed web pages files to my host web site.

updateweb Version 7.1 - A Python utility program which maintains my web site is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

• updateweb.py
• Update Web Page Script
• View
• Download
• updateweb.yaml
• Update Web Page YAML configuration file (demo example only).
• View
• Download

I still need to submit each page to a final link check as web links undergo software rot.

Development Environment

I do my development on my MacBookPro 16-inch, 2021 Apple M1 Max laptop running macOS Sonoma 14.5 (23F79) on which I have loaded a variety of software designer's tools I also develop on a CyberPowerPC Series C 2019 ET8880-1202 running Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa).

Hosting

I use Freeservers, which I have used for a number of years with excellent results. I used to use the file manager in the member area, but now I use my automatic updater program.

I use AT&T DSL with a wireless transceiver so I can communicate to my laptop. Once upon a time, I connected through the phone on a separate line using a modem with Netzero as my ISP.

Viewing

I check my web page appearance in the Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chromium internet browsers, and on iPad and iPhone devices.

Getting Listed

Some tips on submitting the site to search engines are given in search engine watch. I test search for my site using Google.

Communicating

I also occasionally post some specific areas of my site on the newsgroups.