This web site is being developed using Mozilla Firefox, The One True Browser, running on Windows 2000, with Times New Roman as the "variable width font". It is also occasionally tested using Netscrape Navigator (The Fallen Browser) and, less occasionally, Microsoft Internet Exploiter (The Evil Browser).

By providing a variety of ways to index into the encyclopedia (frames, no frames, full index, letter indexes), I hope to balance the needs of users with different connection speeds and different preferences for web site design.

Browser Compatability

The left side of first line of this paragraph should be indented. If it is not, it indicates a problem with cascading style sheets. It should not affect the overall usability of this Encyclopedia.

This entire paragraph should be indented on both the right and left sides. If it is not, it indicates a problem with cascading style sheets. This style is used for long quotations; if it does not look different from the surrounding text, you may not be able to tell where such quotations begin and end.

The following table shows special characters that are used in this Encyclopedia. Some browsers may display them incorrectly.

Boring Technical Details

All of the indexes, including the full index, the individual letter indexes, and the index of entry files, are generated automatically from the entry files themselves. This ensures that all the indexes stay in synch. The index builder is a C#.Net program.

A custom C#.Net program is used to search the Osiris archives. This program ignores whitespace, case, and diacritic characters, to maximize search hits when spellings differ. Unfortunately, much hand-sorting of data is still required. What is needed is an XML standard for organ specifications; see www.ipore.org/XMLorganSpecs.

For the most part, this web site is maintained using a plain text editor, on a PC running Windows 2000.