FAQ 1   Why Capn13.Net ?

Several reasons. In no particular order:- I like the sound of the name and URL, capn13 was my handle in the good 'ol days of the dial-up bulletin-board and the domain was still available.

FAQ 2   Doesn't the abbreviation make it hard to pronounce ?

Yes. So I have to spell it out. Oh well :-)

FAQ 3   Where are the pictures ?

In the album ;-) The link is http://www.capn13.net/gallery/

FAQ 4   Were you in the Navy?

No and the domain name has nothing to do with things nautical. See FAQ1 !

FAQ 5   Why do the columns not line up?!

Update 18 Feb 2005: this was fixed a while ago! The info below is however still relevant for similar designs.

If you seeing poor line-up of the columns and/or boxes and/or overlap of the same, it is likely that you are using Internet Explorer version 5.5 or 6 which has a couple of well -known problems with rendering (drawing on-screen) the layout of sites like this one. For examples of this see http://css.nu/pointers/bugs-ie.html or http://m4rc.ath.cx/msie6css/ or http://drupal.org/node/view/8006. There are many others if you search for them. I've included a CSS workaround to make this work (initially "padding: 0.3em" in non-padded elements but now display: inline; in the left column). It works most of the time.

FAQ 6   Why don't you fix your page to make it work?

Updated 19 Feb 2005 with version numbers and in relation to FAQ5.

The pages on this site render correctly in browsers which follow the official World-wide Web Consortium Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specifications. The fault lies with Internet Explorer and as such is a problem caused by Microsoft. It is not my error, it is a vendor problem, specifically relating to IE's incorrect rendering of CSS2 and elements without an associated "padding" specification.
These pages render correctly in the following browsers:-

Firefox 1.0 (and 0.91)
Mozilla 1.7 and 1.7.5
Netscape 7.1
Safari 1.2.2
Opera version 7.0 and 7.5.3

To conclude: my pages work. Internet Explorer doesn't always :-)

FAQ 7   How do you create your pages ?

My favorite web editor is Bluefish. The site was designed by sketching the layout on paper and then translating that into a CSS template. Once the template was done the HTML code uses it to flow text the way I want it.
My initial design used a "container" DIV to enclose all content. This was not actually required and a code cleanup followed after I had time to peruse some stuff on the Web. Specifically the pages on Liquid Design helped to clean up the extra DIV.

FAQ 8   Why don't you use DreamWeaver ?

Because it would be overkill. Dreamweaver may be helpful for sites that are designed with dynamic content in mind, are slated to be Dreamweaver-maintained and require more thought on the design than on simple, human-maintainable content. (Products like Dreamweaver manage sites by interspersing control-tags throughout the page to enable the software to parse the code correctly. The increase in complexity comes at the price of code readability).

FAQ 8b   Why don't you use Word ?

Because it would be silly.
Even Microsoft didn't design Word to be an HTML editor - the "Save As HTML" feature allows the user to export a formatted word-processing document in HTML and to maintain this formatting as best as it can.
This is an important point : should you have a document that you cannot (for some reason) convert to a PDF and you must present it with formatting intact then Word does a fairly good job. The resulting HTML code is not easily portable because Word created the inline formatting by converting all word-processing formatting (margins, fonts, font enhancements, paragraphs and spacing) into an in-line stylesheet. Furthermore, it is harder to edit by a human webmaster (because they must strip out all the in-line style) and [may be] impossible for a software package to import directly (such a package can't necessarily understand the formatting either and tends to treat it as pure HTML). I haven't tried all the combinations here because this is a bit of a waste of time - Word HTML has its place but not as a web editing tool.

FAQ 9   Why doesn't the left column match the right one?

Update 19 Feb 2005: fixed - I had an extra <DIV> element in there which was messing things up. Since then I've moved away from a 3-column layout on the front index page so the issue is no longer relevant! See the next FAQ for a discussion of site design.

FAQ 10   How did you design your site?

Finally I wanted to move away from tables completely .... on some pages I coded quite quickly I had image and text pairs which were implemented via tables. On the page you are now reading this is fixed and each image and set of paragraphs in this particular FAQ are contained within DIV's.
Credit for that goes to CSS Tables for Fun and Profit. The CSS I've used is below:

div.leftcontent {
		float: left;
		max-width: 67%;
		min-width: 15%;
		background-color: #0058AB;
		margin-right: 15px;
		padding-bottom: 20px;
		display: inline;
}
div.rightcontent {
}

There are still some tables around and I guess they'll be fixed when I have the leisure to do so!

FAQ 11   Why can't I move your image pop-ups around in Opera?

Beats me. In FAQ10, above, when you click on the thumbnails a full-size image appears within a browser window devoid of scrollbars. You can close it by means of the close link, close button and the window close box ... which seems to indicate that it is a fully functional "window". Oddly, in Opera this window may not be dragged "up" and "over" the browser toolbars but it works in Firefox, Mozilla and IE6.
So the honest answer is I don't know! (yet).

FAQ 12   Is Your Site Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Compliant?