Technical policy

Reporting problems

We welcome constructive feedback on technical issues at the address below.

web hyphen admin at sermon on the mount.org.uk

Language

These pages use the XHTML 1.0 Strict standard.

Format

The pages are designed for accessibility and are therefore DIV, rather than TABLE based.

Page style

The layout of the site is enhanced using CSS but the only aspect of the site that relies totally upon CSS to remain usable is the rendition of foreign languages (e.g. Hebrew). The use of these is restricted to the notes pages.

Three style sheets are used:

A sheet that provides a rendering suitable for display on a monitor with a reasonable resolution;
A sheet enhanced for printing;
A sheet that provides a simplified rendering for use by non-visual browsers (e.g. audio browsers).

The context triggered use of the appropriate non-visual and printing style sheets will depend upon your browser’s capabilities.

Mention should also be made of the citation style. This is based upon SBL Style, but for managability currently uses a hybrid of the general style and the author date style.

Fonts

For text in English, only web safe fonts are used. For text in other languages, this site is designed to use the following fonts:

Galatia SIL (for Greek text);
Charis SIL (for Latin text);
Ezra SIL (for Hebrew text).

All three are Open Type fonts and may be downloaded freely from SIL International (scripts.sil.org). The use of Microsoft ® WEFT technology was tried, but proved too cumbersome. Therefore the site looks for a variety of other commonly used alternatives. If you have ever installed an electronic Bible package then it is likely that you will have one of these. If not, then the site tries to use Times New Roman and, failing that, the browsers default serif font. Under Windows ®, Times New Roman does a reasonable job. The failover heirachy for all three languages includes the free Cardo font from Fonts for Scholars (http://scholarsfonts.net).

When viewing pages that use Hebrew it is advisable to enable Unicode support in your browser where that option exists.

Scripts

The site is designed to be usable even when support for scripts is not available. However, enabling scripts allows the site to provide additional content that might be helpful, e.g. Javascript is used to provide dynamically generated:

page citation text;
last updated dates.

Scripts are tested with the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox.