About the James B. Hendryx Pages
Acknowledgments
Thanks to everyone who has sent me email encouraging the construction of
this site. Thanks to Brian Duchinsky for his
Black John of Halfaday Creek page
which inspired me.
From HTML to eBooks
These pages are written in HTML 4.0 / XHTML and CSS.
The common standard for the Web today is HTML 3.2, so these pages
push the limits of current browsers. In fact, the only
browser which shows the pages as I intended is Internet Explorer 5.0.
But don't worry if you aren't using it; the differences are only
cosmetic (appearance of the navigation bar, title formatting, type faces, etc).
HTML is not an entirely suitable way to represent documents
because it is a confusing mixture of structure and formatting markup.
It is semi-workable for one format (eg, the Web), but it lacks
what is needed for documents that you might wish to print, eg
there is no concept of printed page. New standards (CSS, XHTML, XML) promise
to provide solutions to many of these problems,
but support for these is weak right now.
The future of publishing is digital, and
many people think that part of that will be on-demand
printing -- you will go to your local full-service copy center and
request the book. It will then be printed in a half hour
from a digital copy, which might be downloaded from the Web.
There are several proposed digital formats for these electronic
books, but whichever standard is chosen will almost certainly
be based on XML/HTML.
My goal is put the entire works of James B. Hendryx in an
online format, compatible with the web, but also
available for electronic printing.
Here are a couple of readings about Open eBook, perhaps the
most developed of the digital book proposals:
New eBook standard: A best-seller?, and
Open eBook Initiative.
One of the supporters of the Open eBook format is
NuvoMedia, which already has
an existing prouduct, the Rocket eBook which is a small reader based on HTML.
There are other competing formats, such as the rather poor (in my opinion)
Peanut Press eBook format for the Palm OS,
but the support of Microsoft and others for the Open eBook proposal
suggests this will be the most prevalent format.
Web hosting service
This site, www.leepoint.net, is hosted by www.hostsave.com,
which seems to be a reasonable, low-priced ($7/month), web hosting service.
This is a very basic service, but it seems to work quite well.
However, I've got plans to use a database for some of this site,
so I'm looking at a hosting services that provides PHP and MySQL support.
Tools
The tools used to build this site are pretty basic.
The HTML is typed in using a free text-editor (jEdit, Jext) or HTML-editor (HTML-Kit).
Images are scanned on a Umax scanner, then
processed in Paint Shop Pro (a nice, cheap alternative to Photoshop).
And I view them with the latest versions of both Netscape Navigator and
Internet Explorer, and perhaps occasionally other browsers.
Let me know if you have trouble with
any of these pages in your browser.