Help requested testing Web page mods

[Jeffrey Kopp]

Hi. I've modified the script that displays dictionary page images. Only two
such remain on my site: LeJeune's "Chinook Rudiments" and the new "Mystery
Dictonary," <http://home.att.net/~chinookjargon/ljcr24.htm> and
<http://home.att.net/~chinookjargon/unkdic.htm>, respectively. The others
of mine are HTML conversions; I link out to the rest at canadiana.org, the
UW, and Marv's.

I need feedback from people with different browsers reporting if they have
any problems viewing these pages, especially Mackers; Mac versions of
browsers regrettably never work quite the same as they do on PCs, and I
don't have one. (The only way I've found to try something on a Mac around
this town is to sneak into PSU's library and quietly pretend to be a
student--but I'm getting a bit too grey to get away with it.)

I also found bigger images of LeJeune in my archives and swapped them in
(for today's bigger screens) a few weeks ago, but regrettably they're not
much clearer; one of these days I need to rescan it. (I kept my unreduced
but over-contrasted scans, not the unadjusted originals; CD blanks used to
be expensive. I returned the mimeographed original and have only a fair
photocopy to work with now, alas.) The "mystery dictionary" was a difficult
scan job due to its faded condition, so its images are quite large files;
sloooow downloads for dial-ups.

The grisly details (for geeks only--everyone else's eyes will glaze over,
guaranteed): I use a clumsy JavaScript (I did this several years ago) to
present the page images in a frame on the right as they are selected from
the menu in a frame on the left. I originally placed the images in a simple
HTML page generated "on the fly" ("dynamic HTML") using a document.write
statement, but deleted that code when it stopped working on Geocities.
(They began blocking this method, apparently trying to stop people linking
to images warehoused in free space there from sites based elsewhere).

So I deleted that part of the code and just presented the images "bare" in
the right frame. They weren't centered any more, but it worked... until IE6
and NS7.1 came along, which "conveniently" scale unformatted images (not
set into HTML with a specified size) down to fit the screen. So viewers
with these newer browsers saw a tiny shrunken dictionary page until they
clicked on it (once in NS, whose pointer becomes a magnifying glass; twice
in IE6, once on the image and then again on the "expand" button, which
takes a few moments to appear, good grief).

So anyway, having sometime ago moved the site off Geocities, dynamic HTML
formatting should work again, and my document.write scheme is restored on
the "image dictionaries" to accommodate the newer browsers.

Anyone still running NS3 or IE4 should see a simpler menu of page number
buttons (it doesn't track the current page) in the framed menu. The "Next"
and "Previous" page buttons seem to work in Web TV (I have their PC
emulator), but not the numbered page buttons, although the plain
"non-Javascript menu" is accessible by the button (which works the same as
for NS1-2 and IE2-3, if there could possibly be any out there any more).
(How many other sites today will work with NS1??) I haven't tried Opera
yet. (Dunno what you'll see on Unix, Nadja; lemme know.)

Traffic to the CJ/TW sites remains only half what it was before I moved
them three months ago; I have a referral page up at Geocities but have lost
attbi.com completely (since I quit them) and all those links to it there
from sites which weren't updated are now dead.

Ain't keeping up with the Web fun? I can't believe I started the CJ site
before I knew any HTML in Word 6 by using a free macro from Georgia Tech; I
taught myself to code by reading and then starting to edit its output...

Thanks.

Jeff
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