This web site is now developed and maintained by Adrian Walmsley.

The site aims to promote the BCS and the Oxfordshire Branch to local people and to open a new method of communication to members and to IT professionals in the area.

The site underwent major rewriting as of September 2001, as part of the BCS rebranding exercise, and again in July 2002. The 2002 changes were motivated by the guidelines from the RNIB for an accessible web site as well as the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act. The main aim was to generate a site without frames, making it easier to navigate and book mark individual pages, and to add alt tags for all the images on the site.

Our wishlist for this site includes the addition of:

• Site and branch statistics
• Integration into the BCS mailing lists service
• Voting and surveys
• Reviews on past presentations - now covered on the 2003/4 meeting reports page
• Scope for user input - now (May 2004) available through the branch wiki

We migrated the site to the Member Group Hosting facilities introduced by BCS HQ for its branches. Features include the ability to use Perl and PHP and MySQL databases. These potentially allow us to provide a more dynamic website including, but not limited to, the items in the wishlist above. Implementation of new features will depend on volunteers (myself) having time available.

Web Site Construction

This website contains material presented in graphical form (using HTML tables) and in a plain form without the navigation panel for printing.

The layout of the graphical form is based on standard BCS templates.

Starting in 2002, all the individual pages of the site (both graphical and simple forms) were generated from a single XML file. The XML file is processed using an XSLT processor (Mike Kay's excellent SAXON) and XSLT style-sheets.

We are now using version b8.7.1 of SAXON and XSLT 2.0.

This XML-based method of generating the site was started by Kirby James of the Berkshire Branch of the BCS, based on a page layout template created by my predecessor as branch webmaster, Robert Ward (Oxfordshire branch chairman 2003-5). Kirby and Robert worked quite closely for some time to get the two sites looking good, and easy to manage. I am very grateful to both of them for the work that they did on this.

Chronology of changes made by the present webmaster

August 2003: Despite the advantages of having a single source XML file, its size had grown to the point where it was becoming unwieldy to edit and maintain. So, starting in August 2003, I broke out sections of the XML source into individual files and use <xinclude> to re-incorporate their contents before rebuilding the site. As SAXON does not currently support XInclude, the inclusion is done in an initial step using xmllint from the libxml2 package. Windows binaries for libxml2 (including xmllint) are available from http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/index.html. The merged XML file output from xmllint is then processed by SAXON as before.

October 2003: The XSL stylesheets have been reworked so that they don't generate the deprecated HTML <FONT> tags. The code now uses CSS stylesheets instead. To keep everything in the same place, the CSS stylesheets are output when the XSL files are processed, although there is nothing clever here - the definitions exist as literal text within the XSL files.

I have tested the site generation (using xmllint and Saxon) on Linux and Windows but I normally run the process on Windows.

I've tested this website with Internet Explorer 6 and Opera 8 on Windows. It's been tested with Konqueror, Mozilla (and Galeon which uses the Mozilla rendering engine), Netscape 4.8 and 7.1, Opera 8 and finally the w3m text editor, all on SuSE Linux Releases 8.2 and 9.0. Netscape 4.8 exhibits problems with the CSS but the pages are readable and the rendering can be cured by an upgrade to Netscape 7.1.

March 2004: Over the past few months the website has been enhanced with a news feed in an iframe on the home page, and the option for users to take our events schedule in the form of an RSS newsfeed.
In the first steps of a move to the BCS hosted service, we have implemented the BETSIE tool to generate high visibility versions of our pages, and started to use PHP for forms processing. Options were added to the XSL stylesheets to generate PHP pages. Future maintainers please note that the normal PHP delimiter tags ( <?PHP ... ?>) don't work with the XML generation tools but <script language="php">...</script> does.

April 2004: processing for the contact us page recoded in php rather than javascript and formmail.

May 2004: The site is now live in its new location, and is currently being maintained in parallel on both its old and new hosts.
We are using conditional javascript code in the (still static) html to generate <BASE=> statements in the pages on the old host so that every link points to the appropriate page on the new site.
The home page is now index.php to prepare the way for providing more dynamic capabilities.

If you find problems with the site, or want to make suggestions for additions or improvements, or just want more information, please do not hesitate to contact us.

June 2004: Latest enhancements to the site include:

• Interactivity via the branch wiki - which could not unfortunately be hosted on the BCS Member Group Hosting service because of its seriously downlevel version of PHP.
• RSS feeds on the home page showing latest changed pages on the wiki and an area for the user to display a newsfeed of his choice. The news items are no longer displayed in an iframe.
• Introduction of new XML tags <brleft> and <brright> which generate <br clear=> HTML tags to allow text to flow around images correctly.

May 2005 Changes/enhancements:

1. A few months ago a new default theme for the wiki was introduced - more modern looking and less overpoweringly blue
2. The default font on this site has been changed to Trebuchet MS because it is felt to give the site a neater look and is the font used by the default theme on the wiki.
3. The RSS events feed generator has been changed to build a feed that works with Firefox. Previously although it worked with FeedReader and Opera the events RSS feed failed Firefox's parser.

November 2005 Changes/enhancements:

1. As some pages were becoming rather long, I introduced the ability to toggle the display of certain sections of text inside <div> tags, as you should have discovered if you are reading this paragraph.

February 2006 Default font:

• When I set the default font to be Trebuchet MS, I was aware that although it was a Microsoft font, it was one of the web fonts that Microsoft had made available for free download. I installed Trebuchet MS on my SuSE Linux testbed.
• Unfortunately I have just discovered that Microsoft has withdrawn the free web font download. Although the web fonts are now available for purchase, it is now unreasonable to expect users of this site to use those fonts. Over the next few days I will test the alternate fonts to make sure that I am happy with their readability.

Future of this site

Interesting though the XML-based site generation is, it suffers from several limitations:

• The whole site has to be republished when any page is changed.
• Although I have hacked the base XML/XSL to allow generation of XSL stylesheets and PHP pages, it is a hack. The code is starting to look a little messy. I suspect it would be challenging for a new webmaster to take over.
• Responsibility for individual pages cannot be delegated - all changes have to be funnelled through the webmaster.

Notes

1. The level of PHP supported by the BCS Member Group Hosting (MGH) Service was upgraded some time ago. It would now be technically feasible to move the wiki onto that host and it is our long term intention to do so. However, some changes in the directory layout would be necessary as the MGH service does not allow us to create virtual hosts, and your volunteer webmaster has not yet found the time.
2. Copies of the XML, XSLT and CSS files are available below. You can view the XML, XSLT and CSS files with more or less success depending on the browser. It's probably better to download them by right-clicking on their filenames.

Registered Chartered Engineering Institute 1990. BCS is a member of the Council of the European Professional Informatics Societies. BCS Is a Registered Charity; No. 292,786