Stardate 20020629.1447

(Captain's log): The cutover to the new layout is done. If you see any really odd formatting anomalies, please let me know. Following are known problems:

It will look horrible with Netscape Navigator 4.XX, and I do not intend to fix it because I don't know how. The text in the main section and the sidebars will be accessible but the graphics will be royally fouled up. This is a bug in Nav 4 having to do with how dynamically-sized tables work which was fixed in later versions (6 or higher) and in all Mozilla builds, and which never appeared in any other browser so far as I know. Unfortunately, if you use Nav 4 and find it excessively annoying you'll either have to upgrade to a different browser, or use the non-graphics version of the main page. There isn't any way for me to do what I've done with this layout that actually works properly in Nav 4.

It is reported that certain versions of Opera that the graphics don't exactly line up (especially on the right just at the bottom of the viewport and at the top of the first sidebar). It seems to be an off-by-one in the table sizes. The only effect is to make the page look just slightly strange. IE and later versions of Netscape do not do this. For the moment I don't really know what can be done to fix it, and it's a very small glitch anyway.

The new layout is designed to dynamically resize horizontally to take advantage of your full browser window. Set it to the width you feel comfortable with. That seemed to be the best way to deal with the very wide variety of sizes of displays used by my readers.

I have not yet set up a cycling backdrop for the main viewport, so for the moment there's only one picture. I'll probably have that working by tomorrow some time and will start building up a big set of images so that it takes a long time to cycle through them all. (The old page layout had 55 different images, and it took 2 weeks to cycle through them with a change every 6 hours.)

The image behind the viewport is not infinitely wide, and if you set your browser window to some absurd width it will repeat. The one which is there now is a placeholder which is 1056 pixels. I'm probably going to try to make the real ones about 1200, which should satisfy nearly everyone. If I make them too wide then it adds download overhead, which is not desirable. Also, because I no longer know how wide the window is, notable features (e.g. the center of a galaxy) may not necessarily land in the middle of your window. They'll be at a fixed pixel offset from the left side, and if that happens to match your window you're lucky; if not, it will seem off center.