The Home Pages were created using HTML Assistant v1.4 & HTML Assistant Pro V2.00E (Brooklyn North Software Works), initially relying on the HTML Reference Library v1.0 by Stephen Le Hunte (cmlehunt@swan.ac.uk) and later a lot of Internet searches for the tricky bits, often using www.w3schools.com for JavaScript coding.
All animated images were made using the excellent GIF Construction Set (Alchemy Mindworks Inc), the frames of the Earth for the one on this page coming originally from the WORLDWIN program.
The Space Pictures were obtained from the NASA archive (planets) or downloaded from the CompuServe library (Mars Pathfinder). A little image processing was done to sharpen up the Mars pictures, and of course they were all cropped and reduced to a reasonable size. The eclipse, planetary and transit pictures are all the work of myself & my wife.
JavaScript has been used extensively but in a minor way, mainly to give status-line displays that hide the link URL's (much neater!). Pop-up windows for animations and information are also done with JavaScript, using code for floating "div"s found on the Internet (to avoid pop-up blockers). The script has been tested right down to Netscape 2 & 3 and Internet Explorer 3.0 and up to IE8 and Firefox 36, so fingers crossed!
Care was taken to make the pages readable without the images being loaded, and also when expanded to full-screen size. Similarly, the "front page" was limited in size and contains only one large image to reduce initial loading time. Tables are used a lot, mainly for layout reasons.
Dynamically-selected Cascading Style Sheets were added in April 2008 as way of changing the text size to fit different screen resolutions. Provision is made for screen widths of 640, 800 and 1024 (and greater) pixels.
This principle was extended in December 2014 to enable user selection of different text/background colour combinations in the Astro Theory section, to enable easier reading of the articles. The memory of which style is in operation is kept in a data area in a hidden frame of a frameset opened when the theory section is entered.
