Rorkvell

• skip to content

• start
• technics
• features

• start
• web design

from a technical point of view Rorkvell sports some nice extra features.

• Several languages

  Most pages are available in two languages: German and English. It is planned to make these available in more languages. But for this i need translators. The laguage selection is done automatically and configured in the browser setup. If no prefered language is selected then german is the fallback. You may always manually choose the other language down in the footer.

• Several formats

  Most of the pages are available in two formats: html and xhtml. The selection is done automatically by http accept header. If the client does not have configured this, it gets html with mime-type text/html. The Internet Explorer either does not have configured this or is configured to request text/html, and so gets the html version. The Firefox is configured to prefere application/xhtml+xml, nd so gets the xhtml version. The other format is always manually selectable in the footer. With Firefox this selection is adjustable by loading the page about:config and then change the variable network.http.accept.default. My personal setting here is text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png;q=1.0,*/*;q=0.5 Attention:The Internet Explorer is unable to display xhtml. If selected manually, it offers to download the file.

• User selectable style sheets

  If the browser supports it the user has the choice of several styles. Rorkvell sports styles thematically around the TDE Roleplaing Games elements Soil ( Erde, , Ore/Stone (Erz/Stein), Fire (Feuer), Air (Luft), Water (Wasser) and Ice (Eis). The default style is "Erde", because eventhe IE is able to render this style more or less viewable. If any style other than the default is selected, you have to re-select it on every new page, except if the browser natively supports permanent alternate styles or does so by an Extension. For the Firefox there is such an extension. Unfortunately the Internet Explorer is not capable of using alternate stylesheets.
  Remark: It is at any time possible that the default style gets changed. This does not affect the existence and usability of the other styles.

• Navigation

  Additionally to common navigation tools like navigation lists ans links embedded in the text, the site struture is also defined in the link element. This navigation is usable by f.ex. the Lynx textmode browser or by Firefox by installing an Extension. This helps accessing the various areas and pages more efficiently. The attribute names are documented with XMDP format and thus could be directly embedded using the head profile.

• Creative Commons License

  All pages are licensed under a Creative Commons license.

• Mikroformate

  Whereever possible the class names are chosen from some microformats vocabulary. Other class names are dokumented in an XMDP profile file here.

• Access Key

  As applicable i have implemented the Access Key proposal of Jan Eric Hellbusch. Only the keys which actually lead to an existent page are shown. This enables a simple and consistent navigation using the keyboard. Navigation is in most browsers by pressing Alt-Key. In newer Firefox versions this is instead Shift-Alt-Key. But this is changeable by loading the page about:config and then changing two entries:
  • ui.key.chromeAccess change from 4 to 5
  • ui.key.contentAccess change from 5 to 4
  This keyboard navigation is automatically created by a new xsl stylesheet. So if at any time there will be a glossary or a search page, the navigation to them will be automatically included.

• XSL stylesheets

  To keep al those different formats and languages consistent, all pages are generated out of a XML file by some handmade XSL stylesheets. If anyone wants to experiment with that may download them. Good luck.

  For creating html files:

  1. html401.xsl, the main stylesheet for creating html.
  2. xhtml11.xsl, the main stylesheet for creating xhtml.
  3. style.xsl, condensed CSS stylesheet data.
  4. meta.xsl, Templates for generating some standard meta data.
  5. nav.xsl. Generators for the navigation.

  The structure of the XML source files is quite simple. They are very similar to html. Different to html, the head and body element must both have a lang=".." attribute. Furthermore such a XML file can (should) have several head and body sektions, different by their languages. The XSL sheet is told by parameter PARAM LANG .. which language to use.

  In the head area the links (link rel="..".. resulting in the navigation buttons should be found. Most important are the two links with rel="this" and rel="top" to retrieve directory information and construct the relative links.

  In the body area there should first be the level one heading (h1), followed by the main container div id="main". This may contain arbitrary html.

Currently i'm developing these style sheets just for my own personal use. There is no documentation available. If anyone wants to experiment with it, feel free to email me. Too Cool for Internet Explorer