Developers Group

Philosophy of the Website/E-Newsletters

Our website may appear somewhat plain. While we have graphics, they are not required to navigate the website. We want our website to be accessible to as many people as possible, regardless of the state of their technology. So, we keep our website technology simple with light-weight graphics so that it is possible to visit us even if you have a 14.4k modem and Netscape 3. This meets our needs for inclusion and outreach.
Our network has in it people who are using cast-off USA technology and software. We want our website and e-newsletters to be viable in Africa, eastern Europe, the far East, and any war zone. In some parts of the world, someone visits an internet cafe and pays for time to access our website and get email. To expect people to download the latest email client so that they can handle our newsletter or the latest browser to access our website does not meet needs for inclusion, ease, and consideration, among others. They have the software they have. This means we want designs that degrade gracefully to older browsers and email clients.

Special Characters

Per www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/, "the most reliable way to insert special characters by far is to use decimal entity notation. Some characters have four methods of reference: named, decimal, hexadecimal, and UTF-8 (Unicode), but only the decimal form is reliable across browsers and platforms. Use the others if you wish, but only if you want to be bombarded by Netscape 4.x users complaining about your 'corrupted' pages."
An excellent reference for the decimal entities (labeled "numeric" in this source) is http://evolt.org/entities. Another reference is www.jovino.com/entitiesLookup.php.

Using the special character insert button in TinyMCE puts the decimal character in the editor.

TinyMCE Settings

We are limiting TinyMCE to applying styles to text rather than using the font tag, which was depricated in 2000 or so. I removed <h1>, address, and preformatted from the Block Formats in TinyMCE config. There should only be one H1 in a page and that is the Title, so there's no need to apply H1 to any other text. That leaves p,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 for "formatselect - font."

Styles are added in style.css so that they will show up in the styles drop-down list.

We are using "Filtered HTML" for admins and have aded <span> <h2> <h3> <h4> to the list of allowed tags. You can adjust these in Administer > Site Configuration > Input Formats > Filtered HTML > Configure. You change them in "Allowed HTML tags." é é ¥