The Home Pages were created using HTML Assistant v1.4 & HTML Assistant Pro V2.00E (Brooklyn North Software Works), relying on the HTML Reference Library v1.0 by Stephen Le Hunte (cmlehunt@swan.ac.uk) and a lot of Internet searches (!) for the tricky bits.
All animated images were made using the excellent GIF Construction Set (Alchemy Mindworks Inc), the frames of the Earth for the one on this page coming originally from the WORLDWIN program.
JavaScript has been used extensively but in a minor way, mainly to give status-line displays that hide the link URL's (much neater!). Pop-up windows for animations and information are also done with JavaScript, using code for floating "div"s found on the Internet (to avoid pop-up blockers). The script has been tested right down to Netscape 2 & 3 and Internet Explorer 3.0 and up to IE7 and Firefox 3.6.2, so fingers crossed!
Each page was designed to view well on a 1024x768 screen set for point sizes of 12 for proportional and 10 for fixed (about equal to IE at its "Medium" setting). If things look too big (or too small!), for Netscape select Options / General Preferences / Fonts then change the encoding for Latin1 to these values; for IE select View / Text Size then a larger or smaller size. Apologies to users of other browser/screen combinations if this does not work for you: one can't please all of the people all of the time!
Care was taken to make the pages readable without the images being loaded, and also when expanded to full-screen size. Similarly, the "front page" was limited in size and contains only one large image to reduce initial loading time. Tables are used a lot, mainly for layout reasons.
The Space Pictures were obtained from the NASA archive (planets) or downloaded from the CompuServe library (Mars Pathfinder). A little image processing was done to sharpen up the Mars pictures, and of course they were all cropped and reduced to a reasonable size. The eclipse, planetary and transit pictures are all the work of myself & my wife.
Dynamically-selected Cascading Style Sheets were added in April 2008 as way of changing the text size to fit different screen resolutions.
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