e-mail/feedback
E-mail is always welcome. It's through feedback that this site changes and get's better. I try to reply to all e-mail. If you don't get a reply from me that means the odds are your "reply to" address is incorrect. Try sending yourself an e-mail to your "reply to" address and see if you get it. There's nothing worse than keying in a reply only to have it returned to you as undeliverable. Next, please understand that this project is being taken on in chronological order for the most part. Before you tell me I am overlooking a topic, go to the Timeline section in the Reference Library and look at the bottom entry. That's how far I currently am. I recently got chewed out for ignoring the Canadians. Never! It's just that they played a minimal role at Sarajevo.
Last thing on this topic: I am not here to do your homework! Questions are always welcome but please don't request me to send you detailed information that you don't find here. If I had it, it would be out here. Right? Right!
Basics of Navigation
OK so you're new here. Just sent up to the front. Well getting around here is pretty easy if you just keep your head down and follow a couple of simple rules.
When the name of a person, place or thing is highlighted as a link it means you can get more detailed information by clicking on it. People tend to bring up bios and photos, places will bring up maps and things, well, who knows? If you are looking for something in particular then try the search facility.
There is a quick jump navigation tool at the bottom of most pages. Just click the arrow to bring up a list of major locales, select one, then click the "Go" button. Click here to go down and take a look.
External links (links to other sites) are preceded with the character "ø". An example of this is: ø Versailles Treaty 1919. You will need to use your browser's "back" button in order to get back to the trenches.
You will always be better off using your browser's back button (rather than mine) since it will return you to the exact spot on the page you just left and you wont waste time scrolling back to where you were (plus it's faster). I have included this reminder on pages that are often linked to from other pages.
Graphics and Modem Speed
I have tried to keep graphics to a minimum on the first level pages so that they will load at a reasonable speed and then you can decide on the amount of graphic detail you are interested in. I will be the first to admit that this exhibit is heavy on graphics but it does give it a nice look. I would recommend a 28.8 but you can muddle by with a 14.4 since most of the images/icons will be cached after the first few pages. So be patient.
Image Sizes
I know the images are small. It's a tradeoff between the number of images versus the size of the images. Numbers won. I would rather have many small images for you to view than a few large ones. This constraint is due to the fact that I only get so much disk space from my provider. If you or someone you know would be interested in hosting this site (with more disk) then that's another story. On the other hand, please let me know if I am giving you eyestrain by making the images too small.
A note on browsers
Let me say up front that these pages were developed for Netscape Navigator 2.0. You can't design graphic pages and test them out with every browser or you would never get the development done. I have tested "Trenches" out with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.5 (NCSA Mosaic under the hood) and it seems to work reasonably well. The GNN browser (GNNworks v1.2.0), on the other hand, seems to have problems handling side-by-side tables such as used in the Reference Library. If you are here at the First Aid Station because things don't look exactly right then take a few minutes and download Netscape now! Honestly, I'm not on a commission or anything. Just try it, you'll like it.
Microsoft finally got around to releasing a 16 bit version of their Internet Explorer 2.0 (actually I'm running Windows NT but the 32 bit version of 2.0 only works with Windows 95). I downloaded it and tested out the pages on 4-May-1996. Here's the verdict: for the most part it formats the HTML much like Netscape 2.0. There are, however, a few problems I have noticed. Most annoying is that it does not always load all of the images for a page. You might have to hit the reload button in order to get them all to load. Another item involves general formatting; lists are not always displayed correctly. Sometimes the first item of the list is displayed alongside the list header. Lastly, there is nothing I can do to get the home page to fit in the browser window. No matter what I do, there is always a horizontal scroll bar. Oh well, there's always version 2.1.
A note on date format
All dates are in the form dd-mon-year. Where dd is a two digit day of the month without a leading zero, mon is the first three letters of the given month, and year is a four digit year. The hyphens (-) are literal characters. An example would be 4-Aug-1914. This notation has been adopted to faciliate searches on dates. If you are looking for a specific date, then enter it in Trench Search using this format. If you are looking for a specific month, then omit the dd- portion of the date (such as Jul-1914).
A note on European names
European names are specified without accent marks. Thus, "von Bülow" is represented as "von Bulow". This is so you can perform searches on the names without having to enter: "von Bülow" (which is what it looks like in markup). You wouldn't even want to see some of the Serbian names in HTML. So no complaints!
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