398th Web Site Viewing Tips

Introduction

The 398th Web Site is going through a major upgrade in styling and presentation. This page is an example of the new look. This change began in March 2008 and will proceed as time permits. Given several thousands pages to be converted with new ones being added regularly it could well take several years to convert all our 398th pages.

Besides the new look, the pages have been encoded using more up-to-date World Wide Web Consortium standards. In particular, the pages are encoded as XHMTL 1.0 Transitional, a middle ground between the older HMTL and the newer XHMTL. In addition, there is now extensive using of the web language Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). While this may not be of interest to most, what it does mean is that the standards for how pages are rendered have moved along and some of the older techniques used on the original pages are being phased out in newer web browsers. This being the case, it becomes necessarily to get a little ahead of the curve.

Viewing

You can tell our updated pages by the new logo on top, our classic 398th Clearing and Colder design by Jack Olson. Different web browsers, operating systems, and screen resolution lead to slightly different looks and thus what you see can look different in different situations. Testing has taken place using Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 and Firefox for PCs and Safari 3.1 and Firefox 2.0 for Macs. Other operating systems and other browsers most likely will work well with the 398th pages, but haven't been tested. In general, it is best to use the latest available web browser your operating system can support. Explorer 6 is now over a half a decade old and much has changed since its release. So if you can upgrade to a later version or an alternate version, it may be useful to do so.

The new style pages now contain navigation bars at the top (for more easily reaching major sections of the site) and at the bottom (for areas such as our Tips page, for viewing, printing, searching, and our Terms of Use page that describes conditions for printing and reusing our pages). On some pages, such as this one, there is a left navigation bar, which allows easy navigation within the topic page.

Some pages are of fixed width, such as our Crew Photo pages (e.g. see the Hopkins' Crew Photo as an example) but on others where there is a lot of text, the page type is liquid. Liquid pages allow the user to adjust the page width such that the combination of monitor resolution, font size and line width are easier to read.

The fonts you see in a paragraph are what is known as serif fonts while titles are sans-serif. To have some control over how things look on a page, the newer web pages offer a family of serif and non-serif fonts. For the 398th pages, the serif fonts are Georgia, Times New Roman, and Times. Your browser will pick the first available that you have. The Georgia font is what the New York Times uses for their articles. For the 398th Bomb Group web pages, the sans-serif fonts are Veranda, Arial, and Helvetica.

Font size is determined by your choice of size in your preferences. If you have chosen Zing Bats, size 16 , the default font size for the 398th Bomb Group web page paragraphs will be font size 16, but in either Georgia, or Times New Roman or Times. Of course your browser will allow you to make the font larger or smaller as you find desirable.