Techniques
used
Reference books
and
sources
Compatibility
problems
Screen resolution
and general
appearance
The sound
recordings
Pictures
In this article, and the related pages it leads to, I shall talk about the techniques used in building this web site (together with details of some reference sources), reasons for the choice of recordings in the music-hall section, the copyright problem, and technical process involved in the transfers.
This site started as much as a technical exercise as anything else: I wanted to find out how web pages were done. Of course, making (and posting up) web pages isn't of much use unless you have some content to put in them - preferably content which does not breach copyright. In my case the fact that I had written a book on Music Hall, and have a number of old records of Music Hall performers, provided the obvious starting point: and that led to the idea of providing pages on the technical business of reproducing 78rpm records, a subject I have gone into in some detail over the years. Of course nowadays there are extremely expensive technical solutions to that problem, which are beyond the financial ability of most people: but the simpler solutions I arrived at in the past could be of interest to some collectors.
When I started I knew nothing about HTML and building web pages. I had seen a few 'how to' articles in magazines, but most of my information came from a couple of books and some web pages, listed on a separate page. (The links in the rest of this section will open in a separate window, since there is no link back here from these pages: close the window to return to this page.) I have found excuses to use most of the main techniques: hidden tables for layout (Home Page, history of the family, site map); frames to provide a constantly present index (Music hall, Warwick School) or pictures which could be triggered from the text (Biography, which uses invisible division between the frames), image maps (Music Hall, Home Page), a visible table (the equalizations in 'Reproduction of 78rpm recordings'), text flowing round pictures, linked style sheets (as on this page), animated gifs (Home Page, Links, and the slide show of Stratford-on-Avon in the biography), CSS positioning (Home Page),and one bit of Java on the Jokes page (taken ready-made from a book - I haven't tried to learn programming in Java: far too complicated for me). (I originally had a guestbook, which worked from a script provided by my ISP, Clara.net, but had to abandon it because of persistent spam - people posting messages full of links to the usual offensive sites.)
I have more recently made use of JavaScript on the Home Page and the Warwick School pages to do rollovers and pop-up notes; on all the pages which appear in frames to prevent them displaying outside the frame (for example, this is a link to the individual page on Harry Tate: you should find that it will be forced into the frameset); and on this page for the sliding title - if your browser won't handle this you may just see the title twice (and Internet Explorer 5 on Windows behaves very oddly, whereas 4 is OK). One downside of JavaScript - which is still developing - is that visitors with older browsers such as Internet Explorer 3.02 may get error messages because the browser doesn't recognize the new commands. .
The first lesson was that what works on one platform doesn't work on another. I worked on an Apple Macintosh Performa 5400/180, which has a 15 inch screen, which I normally use with a resolution of 640 by 480. (As many people still use this setting, I tried to make all the web pages work in it satisfactorily.) The pages were initially made in Claris Home Page 1.0 (free on a CD with a magazine) with additional HTML added by hand, and checked in Internet Explorer 4.01 and Netscape Navigator 4.5.
I must say that I am not a fan of Netscape (although I give it credit for a useful JavaScript debugger, much better than Internet Explorer's cryptic error messages) I found a number of cases where it didn't act as expected with the HTML. For example Claris Home Page uses the tag <P ALIGN=CENTER> ..... </P> to centre anything, and while Navigator accepts this with text and images, it refuses to centre tables. I had to use <P><CENTER><TABLE> ..... </TABLE></CENTER></P> to get the result I wanted. Irritatingly, Claris Home Page always rewrote this without being asked back to <P ALIGN=CENTER> whenever I made changes, unless I altered it back as the last thing before saving! Netscape (at least up to version 4.5) is also extremely flaky in its handling of Cascading Style Sheets, losing the styles if you re-size the window (I have done my best to counter this with JavaScript by forcing a reload ); and playing complete havoc with borders round images. (Internet Explorer isn't blameless, either; there is an alarmingly long list of bugs in both published by the CSS Pointers Group.)
Having got the pages to work on both browsers on a Mac, I then checked them at work, on Windows 95 and IE3.02. This produced more incompatibilities. One was that the upper frame of 'Jokes' was intended not to have a scroll bar, but move from joke to joke entirely by the use of links to anchors: this works fine on a Mac, but on Windows, if there is no scroll-bar then the links don't work either. Another was that fonts appear considerably larger on a Windows monitor - because the resolution is usually 96 dpi as against the Mac's 72 dpi, fonts (which are specified in 'points' - seventy-seconds of an inch - appear one-third larger relative to the graphics, which are specified in pixels: this doesn't help your attempts at layout one bit. (I have explained this in more detail and suggested a workaround on a separate page.) IE3 was also a bit picky about style-sheets, and refused to recognise alternative fonts (in the end I gave that up and simply specified 'serif' or 'sans-serif', which usually seem to throw up Times New Roman and Arial respectively). Of course since then IE has gone through various iterations and has ceased development for the Mac version.
I subsequently upgraded to Claris (aka FileMaker) Home Page 3.0, which had a number of improvements - among them not re-writing my HTML as complained of above, and a spell-checker (even though it thinks 'equalize' is spelt with an 's'). I also upgraded the computer to a Power Macintosh G3/300 with the Apple flat-panel screen, normally used in a resolution of 800 by 600 (though I still tried to make sure that pages worked in 640 by 480 - I wonder how many people are still using that resolution?). Subsequently, with the move to OSX and a G5 iMac, and the irritating necessity of using the Classic Environment to run Claris Home Page, I have been using other programs such as KompoZer and PageSpinner.
I first designed the home page using a monitor with a resolution of 640x480 (this was in 1998 when this size was still fairly common). As time went on and larger monitor sizes became common I made various alterations to the layout, principally in centering the decorative twiddly-bits between other items or the page edge to help fill up the space. Eventually (June 2004) I designed a new version of the page with larger graphics - roughly twice the linear size - to use the space on larger monitors better. The actual 'index' page is a frameset, calling the now renamed home page. It uses Javascript to detect your monitor resolution: The screenshots below show the two versions (though the smaller one has been blown up to roughly the same size and uses a smaller font more suitable to the screen size):
You can see the small version (out of its frame) here, and the large version here.
The snag with this is though you may have a large monitor you may not have a broadband connection, and the page takes almost two minutes to download over a dial-up connection (largely due to the rotating record animated GIF). In order to get round this the navigation bar across the top offers a link to the older version for those who don't want to wait. Of course doing this would mean that anyone who goes to another page and then back to the home page would be offered the large version again, so I have used a cookie to let your browser remember which version of the home page you chose - if you choose the narrowband (small) version then you will always get this until you choose the broadband (large) version again. I should perhaps explain for anyone still unsure about cookies is that this is simply a very short text file which is placed in a cache by your browser and can be referred to when the page is loaded again: it cannot read any other details than the simple information written to it (in this case whether you have chosen the smaller home page), and cannot read any other data from your computer. You can set your browser's preferences to reject cookies, but of course if you do this you will be offered the broadband version every time.
I made some changes to the music-hall pages (which had not been much changed since they were first put up in 1998), altering the spacing and using larger pictures: in order to use the space on modern large monitors I also added a border, though this will not be visible on monitors of 800x600 or smaller (I used Javascript to detect the monitor resolution and then show or not show the tables which make up the border). In 2007 I finally got round to embedding the audio in small pop-up pages to make a 'player' - a facility which was not available when I first created the pages in 1998. I also redid most of the Warwick School photos in a larger size, again for people with larger monitors.
In a similar way I have provided larger versions of the Stratford-on-Avon pictures; again, the size of picture you initially see depends on your monitor resolution, but you can choose the other version and you will then get that version of all the pictures until you change versions again - this is done without using a cookie.
Originally I posted RealAudio versions of the music-hall files, adding MP3 versions at a later date: I've now removed the RealAudio files as with broadband and modern computers they are redundant (and adversely affect the quality). I have written more detailed notes on the preparation of the recordings, and the copyright situation affecting their selection, on a separate page.
PicturesThe various pictures were mostly copied out of books, in the case of Music Hall, or from existing prints or transparencies in the case of the biography and family history. When I originally made the site I didn't have a scanner, so I used a Sony Mavica FD7 digital camera. I have subsequently acquired a Umax 2000U and have remade some of the pictures, particularly the documents on the family history page.
It's been a lot of fun assembling and maintaining this site: it's a game, really, trying to get the results you want within the restrictions of HTML and the different platforms, browsers, and resolutions. Thank you for visiting: do come again and have a look.
