very nice Russ,so how is the Eraser set?
DJ

Did I just hear you say you are offering to do all the new coding work for Russ yourself?

Good man!

--SKot

Unless there's something going on I don't see, no coding is necessary for a static website like GTF. Only markup. And some good markup and CSS could make it look very nice.

First thing I'd do, is I'd take that banner, cut out all the black space, and make it a transparent PNG. That way, the starfield (or whatever background you use in the future) will be visible behind it, instead of a big black rectangle. Think of it as matte boxes vs. subtle matte lines. I've already done this, if you're interested. The file is slightly larger, but I might be able to trim it down a little by playing with the colors.

Next, I'd consider making the navigation more logical, or at least more readable. I often enlarge text on my monitor to help me see it; because your top frame doesn't have a scroll bar, when I enlarge the text it gets chopped off, or just invisible. This can be fixed by rethinking the frame layout, or ditching the frames altogether and doing something clever with CSS and/or javascript. (Make sure it works with a plain text browser before putting in JS tricks, please; many of us don't have or want JS.) I can come up with some templates that might look better if you'd like.

The page doesn't validate as HTML 3.2. It's closer to HTML 4 Frameset, but even then, it has a few errors. I'd fix those up. If you're going to declare an HTML DTD, you should conform to it.

It looks like you're using tables for non-tabular data. HTML should be used for markup, and CSS for style. In fact, I'm not sure what's going on here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/russdawson/gtf/dvd/OT/tr47.html
There's a couple end tags for tables that were never opened, and many elements put within tables that aren't allowed there. This can be avoided by separating structure from style. And two start tags for your body element.

If you write tag soup, you might be able to get it to work in most of the browsers used today. But it's much better to write to the standards first, and then make tweaks for the special cases that require it. That way you're not forever rewriting things to work in new user agents. It's also more accessible for visually impaired persons that way; I recall we had someone visit OT.com who used the JAWS screen reader, so we know there are people in our community who might benefit from that. (I commend you for using alt elements, btw.)

If you need a markup monkey to fix some of this stuff ... I've got some free time. I'd love to give something back to the O-OT community. Besides my wit and charm, I mean.

It's so weird seeing my DVDs on there.

I'll set up a site on my own server where I can keep changes I've made and maybe you can see them live and download them at your convenience. I'm not an HTML Jedi, but I can at least fix the formal problems with the syntax then we can hammer out logical and stylistic problems later. The site will eventually be up at http://www.ofkaiser.com/gtf/.

WRT the banner, it's not perfect, like I said it's a little bit bigger (20-30k) and there are black lines around some of the text. But those won't show up against a starfield, only against a lighter background -- an effect we know very well from the SW Trilogy. I just used the Gimp to add an alpha channel, then select the black regions and cut them away. I posterized the yellow aurebesh text to make the file 12k smaller then cleaned up a few stray pixels with the eraser.

I can't get the site to pull up.

Edit: Nevermind, it is working now.

Thoughts:

1. This thread might be better in the preservation/other forum. I'll move it.

2. Yes we definitely need an up-to-date list and summary of the various projects created by members of this forum.

3. The current lists at the top of each forum (eg here) quickly become outdated.

4. A wiki-style approach seemed like a good idea, it worked briefly on that dvdholocron site, but takeup of the ot.com/fanedits.com project wiki (here) was disappointing.