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INTERNATIONAL SITE: Technical Specifications Assumed Screen Resolution 800 pixels x 600 pixels (Site top navigation should not scroll horizontally on a monitor with these screen dimensions; vertical scrolling is permitted, but as a rule users dislike long scrolling screens) Browsers and Operating Systems We test for several Macintosh, Windows 95, and Windows 98 configurations, and will begin testing with Windows 2000 shortly. Our test computers are prepared with new, complete installations of both the operating system and the browser. Combinations we support: Win 95/Internet Explorer 4.0, 4.x, 5.0 We do not test our site's performance on Linux or other less prevalent operating systems. Plug-ins and Media Extensions Typical Web users dislike having to get new plug-ins or other large downloads in order to enjoy a Web site, and will simply stop coming to your site if asked to do so too many times. We have, however, embraced several plug-in technologies that provide significant enhancements to our capabilities and that, on balance, we believe are worth the download. These include: Real Networks RealMedia G3 (streaming audio and video) Other Coding Conventions We require stylesheets or inline style specifications to determine text attributes. Dynamic HTML is permitted, so long as it is HTML 4 compliant and degrades gracefully for browsers that do not support it. No use of FONT or CENTER tags allowed. We endorse the use of CGI-scripting and Perl 5.0. We employ javascript where it makes sense to do so. Color Palette Flat-color gifs, fonts, and backgrounds use the 216 "browser-safe" colors that do not dither on either PCs or Macintosh computers. Specifications for these may be found at http://www.lynda.com/hex.html and elsewhere, and are built into the latest versions of many Web-authoring and design tools. The hexidecimal code for National Geographic gold is (0xFFCC00) We employ a photograph gamma correction of 2.2 when previewing photographs for PC computers. Database Technology We have adopted Oracle as our standard database-hosting software, and ColdFusion (4.0, 4.x) as our standard "middleware" for serving information from our Oracle databases. International partners may have other core database technologies in place, and are welcome to use them to serve content for their sites. For partners who have not yet committed to any set of database conventions, there may be advantages to adopting ours. Do so at your discretion. Total Screen Size Smaller is better. For the first few years after we launched our site, we kept most of our screens below 35k in total file size, including screen code, images, and advertisements. That figure is no longer realistic, and our current main screen is roughly 90k in total download size. But international partners should be aware that large screens frustrate the Web audience, so it is very much in their interest to keep screen sizes as small as possible. Note as well that the more individual elements on a screen (say, lots of small images), the longer the screen takes to download and the more likely the audience will stop coming to a site. |