Oct 25, 2000 - Map zoom pages now follow the Library of Congress sidecar navigation layout.  Some pages renamed to provide better functioning on NT server.

Anatomy of a Map page online, illustrating parts of a map from using Delisle and Homann maps.

Sept 29, 2000 - Revised What is a Map page, new Anatomy of a Map page with beta graphics.
Various cosmetic changes.
Sort order changed in map search; now by date then by title.

August 25, 2000 - All image service has migrated to the UTA server.

August 23, 2000 - Digital Images from the sessions at UTA moved to UTA server.
All Lizardtech (*.sid) images copied to UTA server to facilitate move of Image Server to the www.uta.edu machine.

August 22, 2000 - The images files have been compressed to minimize bandwidth usage and download time. This change should represent a 50-65% increase in speed when loading graphics. NOTE: This applies to site graphics only; the map images themselves were left intact.
Authorless citations debugged.

August 21, 2000 - The last of the second-round of maps is online, the monstrous Lloyd's map. It was a challenge and fun to do.
The old map indexes (indices, if you prefer) have been replaced by a search function. This should reduce download times. No Boolean searches yet.

June 12, 2000 - The first of the "notebook maps" with matrix text go up today.

July 11, 2000 - The last of the teacher maps are posted. The large Journal map was being cantankerous, but finally yielded.

June 16, 2000 - The first of the scanned maps are being served by the Lizardtech server. The image server is currently offsite, but will be moved to a UTA machine soon.

Technical

• Site Philosophy: The site is intended to be as inclusive as possible, in order to facilitate use by students and teachers regardless of their web capabilities. There are no frames, javascript, Flash, Active Scripting or Java required to navigate or use the site. (Java and plug-in tools are available but not required for viewing maps).

• Webserver (web pages): Microsoft IIS 4.0 handles the web page service on a Microsoft box.

• Webserver (on-the-fly graphics): Netscape Commerce Server on a Solaris box.

• Editors: To facilitate non-technical maintenance, the site is built using FrontPage. To minimize FrontPage's interference with code format and content external editors like vi, vim, and notepad are used for actual editing.

• File storage: Original scans (20-50MB each) are stored on cd-r in the iso-9660 level 1 format. JPGs available for download are compressed. Lizardtech (pannable, zoomable) images are stored in native MrSid format, a proprietary .tif variant.

• Map images: There are three types of images on this site.
  1. MrSID images: on-the-fly image scaling, panning, and zooming. These images can be displayed in the browser, in a java client, or in a standalone viewer on the user's machine. The zoom/pan functions of the MrSid format and server reduce total bandwidth usage and, in general, provide a superior viewing experience. For more information, see Lizardtech's website.
  2. Navigational images: sidecar images shown alongside maps to illustrate what section is currently viewed. These are generated on-the-fly and the rectangles are generated by GD.pm and related underlying code.
  3. Conventional images for thumbnails and similar uses: medium quality JPG images.
  All JPG and GIF files are processed in Adobe Photoshop 5.5 using the file-compressing "Save for Web" function. JPGs were optimized and GIFs were color-reduced until visibly degraded, then backed off a bit to restore visual quality.

• Filetype philosophy: Where possible, the lowest-impact page type is used: HTML is preferred to SHTML, which is preferred to ASP.

  JPG is preferred to GIF except where colors are <= 256 or a transparency is needed (although both JPG and PNG variants offer transparencies, many browsers would not handle this correctly).

• Functional philosophy: the site is intended to generate specific data from generic scripts. The data, below, is what makes the various views and pages different. This way the site is easily expandable by editing the database and FTP'ing up new image sources.

• Database connectivity: Because of the built-in relational database objects in VBScript/FrontPage, the site's data is stored in a Microsoft Access database. Concerns about overtasking the serverless MDB database are somewhat relieved by the fact that users are reading only. There is one point of alteration for the database (the webmaster).
  If the MDB gets swamped, we will bypass DSN (Data Source Name) to increase connection efficiency.

  The MDB includes tables for maps, bibliographic information, faculty and teacher information, etc.

• Programming languages: .asp pages are written in VBScript, which tie into existing and custom Visual Basic components. The MrSid image pages (.pl, .cgi) are written in perl.

• Maintenance and consistency: The basic layout of the pages, menus, and footers are stored in textfiles which are SSI included at run-time.

• Look and Feel: Colors, fonts, and graphical elements are a reference to sixteenth century cartography. In particular, the "corners" are pulled from Ortelius. The cartographic fonts are so similar in color and style that beta-testers thought menu elements were typographic elements from an original map.