Our Family History Web Site Viewing Tips

Introduction

The Our Family History Web Site is going through a major upgrade in styling and presentation. This page is an example of the new look. This change began in early 2009 and will proceed as time permits. Given about a thousand pages to be converted with new ones being added regularly it could well take several years to convert all of Our Family History Web Site pages.

Besides the new look, the pages have been encoded using more up-to-date World Wide Web Consortium standards. In particular, the pages are encoded as XHMTL 1.0 Transitional, a middle ground between the older HMTL and the newer XHMTL. In addition, there is now extensive using of the web language Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While this may not be of interest to most, what it does mean is that the standards for how pages are rendered have moved along and some of the older techniques used on the original pages are being phased out in newer web browsers. This being the case, it becomes necessarily to get a little ahead of the curve.

Viewing

You can tell our updated pages by the new logo on top left, the representative White Star Line Britannic, the ship that brought some of the Jordans to America. Thanks go to Wikipedia Commons for its use.

Different web browsers, operating systems, and screen resolution lead to slightly different looks and thus what you see can look different in different situations. In general, it is best to use the latest available web browser your operating system can support.

The new style pages now contain navigation bars at the top (for more easily reaching topics about various families contained in the site) and at the bottom (for the Site Index, the Tips page and the Contacts page.

Most of the new pages are of a type called liquid. Liquid pages allow the user to adjust the page width such that the combination of monitor resolution, font size and line width are easier to read.

The fonts you see in a paragraph are what is known as serif fonts while titles are sans-serif. To have some control over how things look on a page, the newer web pages offer a family of serif and non-serif fonts. For the Our Family History web pages, the serif fonts are Georgia, Times New Roman, and Times. Your browser will pick the first available that you have. The Georgia font is what the New York Times uses for their articles. For the Our Family History web pages, the sans-serif fonts are Veranda, Arial, and Helvetica.

Font size is determined by your choice of size in your preferences. If you have chosen Zing Bats, size 16 , the default font size for the Our Family History web page paragraphs will be font size 16, but in either Georgia, or Times New Roman or Times. Of course your browser will allow you to make the font larger or smaller as you find desirable.