Welcome to the new Boston By Foot web site. Here you will find some links and information related to the construction and workings of this web site.
This web site is designed around the mission of Boston By Foot -- to promote Boston's rich architectural and historical heritage. This web site celebrates Boston as much as it promotes awareness of the work and services provided by this educational organization driven by a large group of passionate volunteers. The exploration of through this site reflects our experiences in exploring Boston.
If you are having a problem using this web site or you encounter an incompatibility with your web browser, please drop us a line and let us know what the problem is and what browser and version you are using.
Personalizing the Web Site
We understand not every web page feature or color palette works for everyone. We offer a way to set basic the look and behavioral preferences of this web site.
The dark blue color scheme looks much better (to us) when viewed from a browser that implements font anti-aliasing. On Windows, this feature may need to be configured. An alternative is to change the color scheme.
Technical Standards
We've worked hard in making this site compliant with various current specifications and recommendations. We strive to publish compliant formats for XHTML 1.1, CSS2, RSS 2.0, and iCAL RFC 2445 as well as meet Section 508 and W3C-CAG AA guidelines for accessibility.
Sometimes errors get through. From time to time we validate all the code on the web site for compliance. Being a non-profit volunteer based organization, we don't have the staff or the content management systems available to ensure an error-free web site at all times. If you do spot an error, we'd appreciate letting us know.
Browser Compatibility
We would like to say works with any browser but we simply don't have access to any browser to find out. What we do know is that not all browsers interpret web specifications in the same way and these specifications are constantly changing. The intended feel of this web site is best achieved with more recent releases of web browsers that adhere to the above specifications.
This web site works well with not-so-ancient versions of Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, Seamonkey, Opera, OmniWeb and Safari which, for the most part, follow the standards listed above. On the OSX side, Gecko-based browsers have a couple of display issues we've had to workaround while Safari 3 & OmniWeb deliver impressive results. Firefox & friends appear to do the best job on the Windows side. We are still working through some quirks with IE7 and will refrain commenting on IE6 in polite company. Linux? You'll have to let us know.
In general, the browser issues we tend to encounter involve the games section which make heavy use of Java and Javascript, and less critical display features such as the availability of the slide show, the "easter-egg" tooltips, the quality of the font anti-aliasing, side-by-side columns, and the color accuracy of the images.
Very old browsers such as IE5, Netscape 6, and Opera 5 are not supported due to their lack of compliance with parts of the CSS2 specification this site relies on to display something other than mush. These browsers are redirected to an older version of this site.
Acknowledgements
See the site credits page for the contributors and designers of this web site.
