About the design of this website

The Holy Grail CSS layout

Serendipitously and auspiciously, the science and art of web design has its own Grael, called the "Holy Grael CSS layout", as a quest for the very best web page structures. Typically with a header, several columns, and a footer. Just like this!

For anyone interested in the history of the Holy Grail CSS layout, this A List Apart article has a good summary of the quest.

Responsive Design

The move towards responsive designs suitable for mobile and tablet devices has added an extra dimension to all this. This web site is using a CSS3 Flexbox responsive design. That means pure and proper CSS and no nasty Javascript hacks. Guidelines on how to do that are here: Mozilla CSS Flexbox guidelines.

Fonts

Thanks and acknowledgements to Sorkin Type Co for their Gravitas One font.

Background image

Thanks and acknowledgements to : projects.verou.me/css3patterns

Performance and Security

To improve performance and security, and minimise the demand on your internet bandwidth, all dynamic coding on this website is generated server-side. This is shared by the HTTPS web server (using Let’s Encrypt) and Postgres SQL server. Also, with an absolute minimum of Javascript, and definitely no bandwidth-hogging Javascript library add-ons.

Privacy

To respect your privacy, this website also contains no annoying adverts and absolutely no sneaky tracking scripts (like FaceBook Pixel). You can prove this to your own satisfaction with the Ublock Origin ad-blocker and the Ghostery browser extensions.

Beautiful Soup

I'd just like to say how much I've appreciated having Beautiful Soup available. It's made it *so* much easier to build the References and Index pages.

Keith Macdonald, September 2017