Not Just A Pretty Face!
What's Going On
The new look design introduces a lot of new and interesting features. Most of these are presentation related, but others make using the Proton site a lot easier.
The site was designed with Firefox and Internet Explorer in mind. It should look fairly consistent in most modern browsers, and to be sure, we've tested the aesthetics of the site with IE 6.0, Mozilla Firefox 1.0PR and Opera 7.2 on WIN32. IE has some strange quirks when trying to highlight text, and it doesn't support some CSS selectors properly, but this problem is purely presentational, and nothing detrimental to the actual usage of the site.
Printing
We may keep tweaking this as the site matures, but essentially, printing a webpage from this site immediately strips menus, footers and presentation related graphics - any graphics like screenshots or product photos remain on the page. This should help reduce the volume of ink you use every time you print one of our webpages, hoorah!
Text Size
Because it's sometimes hard to read text on webpages, we've made it scalable. A lot of websites lock down text sizes, which is obviously restrictive if you find it hard to read small text on screen.
The easiest way to change the text size on Internet Explorer and Firefox is: View > Text Size.
Acronyms
Throughout the site we've tried to make sure all acronyms are fully expanded. We do this by utilising the <acronym> tag in HTML. The acronym tag works when hovering your mouse over a marked acronym like this one.
In the case of the Proton Development Suite, this allows us to use acronyms aimed at the PICBASIC / Electronics industry, but it also gives the flexibility to help explain acronyms to people just starting out in the Electronics arena. After all, we weren't all born PICBASIC gurus :)
Links
We all hate having new windows forced on us by websites - before you know it there's about 30 windows open. So we got rid of those nasty new window links. When a link goes away from our site it's marked by a small icon to the right of the link. If you want to return to the Proton website afterwards, you can just use the back button as normal. (You can of course CTRL+LeftClick in Firefox to open a new tab)
- An external link
Where possible we utilise the 'title' attribute to further explain where a link will take you, or what a link means. Again, to take advantage of titles, simply hover your mouse over a link, and if a title has been applied it will appear. Try this as an example
Speedy Page Loading
By using proper XHTML and CSS markup we've dramatically reduced the time it takes our pages to load - allowing you to get the information you want, fast.
Standards Compliant Code
Because we care about web standards we've tried to adhere to both the W3C's XHTML 1.0 and CSS standards. This might not mean much to you, but it ensures that our pages are error free and less likely to cause problems with older browers, as well as the browers of the future.
