About this website

Tuesday 19 March 2024
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About this website

November 2018: new website under development
watch this space

This version 3.9.97 of The Art of Music website was built some 10 years ago, mostly hand-coded – in XHTML* using Dreamweaver (MX, later 8, now CS6), preprocessed by PHP and connected to a MySQL database.

Positioning, formatting and layout have all been done with CSS for faster downloading and ease of maintenance. Even the drop-down menu bar is text-based, using only two or three images, style sheets and 1k of JavaScript. It all degrades gracefully for older browsers.

* mostly now in HTML5 and incorporating some CSS3 styling.

Copyright policy

Information provided on this website is copyright © 1992-2024 The Art of Music. However, in most cases (but see below) you are allowed to make non-commercial use of the material, providing due credit – together with a link to this site – is given.

If you do not give due credit, then please do not use any materials from this website.

Publications copyright policy

Our publications may not be copied except under licence from us in writing. (Naturally, the provision described above does not apply to our publications since we're running a business!)

Many of our publications are available as digital downloads.

Dictionary of internet terminology
Term Meaning

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets: a way of styling a whole website with minimal markup (see HTML). Style sheets can define the look of anything on a web page, from heading and paragraph styles to tables. By including references to images, style sheets can make a simple text-based web page into one in which every element is positioned and graphics and images applied that don't exist in the HTML.

See csszengarden.com for a fascinating demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design. Designers use pre-existing HTML coding and create their design simply through the use of style sheets. By studying the CSS, other designers can understand better how to separate design from content.

> csszengarden.com

domain name

Strictly speaking this is the address of any computer on the internet. More often, though, it refers to the hostname, providing a memorable name than a numeric IP address. The domain name example.com, for example, consists of a top-level domain "com", preceded by a dot ("period" in American English), preceded by the label "example".

A hostname consists of a series of DNS labels separated by dots.

Contact us if you would like us to design a website and obtain a suitable domain name for you.
Alternatively you can check for your own domain name here:

 

e-mail address encryption

Spammers use computers to harvest e-mail addresses from websites in order to send them unwanted e-mails for undesired products, or to "phish" for your banking details.

JavaScript coding for cloaking of email addresses helps to avoid them being picked up by spammers. The cloaking downgrades gracefully if you do not have JavaScript enabled as you will still be able to see the address – although you will need to copy and paste it into your browser.

All the email addresses on this website have been encrypted (for example, spamblocktest(at)theartofmusic.co.uk). Naturally, in order to product our clients we also encrypt e-mail addresses placed on websites that we build.

ecological hosting

For solar-powered web hosting you could try Ecological Hosting by Athenaeum.

free software

View BBC website "Click" programme for an overview of how you can get free software for your computer – and legally.

HTML

HyperText Mark-up Language: the language of the web. Ordinary text is used, but it is "marked up" to enable the web browser to perform a specific function.

Surrounding a piece of text with the <em> tag will usually make it appear in italics (for example, "<em>this is italic text</em>" shows up in your browser as "this is italic text").

Surrounding a piece of text with the <title> tag in the <head> section of the page will show up on the top left of the browser as the title of the page (for example, the title of this page appears in the underlying HTML as "<title>About this website</title>" Right-click on the page to "View (Page) Source" and then look near the top of the code for "<title>" to see it in context.

See CSS for more information about how the use of style sheets both makes text mark-up easier to control from the point of view of both the user and the programmer.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides definitions for this mark-up code, together with validation tools for both HTML and CSS in order to help web developers write valid code that will work as consistently as possible in all browsers (although there are notably a number of problems with one proprietary browser in particular).

> www.w3.org

IP address

Internet Protocol Address: Every computer connected to the internet needs a unique address known as an IP address, as this provides a unique identification for a computer and the network to which it belongs.

The IP address is a numeric address written as a set of four numbers separated by dots (for example 192.212.38.15) and can be static or dynamic. A static IP address would always be the same every time you make a connection; a dynamic IP address changes every time you connect.