Scotland: Single malt whisky through the producing distilleries: history, making and tasting
Texte français

About this site and the technology used

Technology

This site is recently completely re-looked, in order to be easier to maintain and to enhance its presentation. To reach both goals, this new version makes usage of external style sheets (CSS).
The CSS technology is generally recommended for development of web sites, and is based on internationally accepted standards, which are supported by most of the modern browsers.

However there are some differences in the display and even in the behaviour with some functions from one browser to another one. This site has been reviewed with the browsers mentioned here under. (between brackets, the percentage of users by browser over the 6 first months of 2005)

According to the results of many display and speed tests, I only can recommend heartily the usage of Firefox, which can be installed within 5 minutes, without any problem.To get Firefox, just click the following button:

If you have any display problem with this site (not mentioned hereunder), please do not hesitate to tell the webmaster of this site.

Comments about the display with several browsers:

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Microsoft Internet Explorer (used by 81% of the visitors of this site during the 6 first months of 2005) does not support all the standard functionality of CSS recommendation. It is the browser causing the most problems. The version 6 (the most widely used) supports more or less CSS, and previous versions could not be tested, as they are not easily available in 2005. Apparently, the version 5.0 gives some troubles.

As a result, very slow display, and even incomplete display of some elements. The menus in the left and right margin are very slow on "mouse over". Some of the submenu's do not work, as they cannot be clicked because they disappear before the user had a chance to click it... Other links do not work, because they are covering other links on the main page.

The display of the pages is abnormally slow. The reason of this slowness is that Explorer waits till the whole is read into the memory before it begins to display it.

The right menu (distillery list) is rather heavy (but generally found very convenient by the visitors) and takes a few seconds to display.

Firefox

None of the problems mentioned above exist with Firefox (and I may add with none of the other tested browsers). The display is much faster with Firefox.

One of the reasons Firefox is much faster is that it does not wait till the entire page has been read to begin to display it. Thus, the middle column, which contains the information is displayed while the right column (distillery list) is still being read. This makes a difference of several seconds for every page.This without taking into account the fact that Firefox is generally much faster than Explorer is.

Firefox: Just try it out, and you'll like it. This a general opinion about this browser which represents probably the state of the art in this matter, and which is still in constant evolution. And it is free...

To install Firefox: just go to Mozilla' site:

www.mozilla.org

Safari

Safari is a MacIntosh browser. There are no specific problems with that browser.

Netscape

Netscape is build round the same engine as Firefox. So it has none of the problems Microsoft Internet Explorer experiences.

Mozilla

Mozilla is a browser from the same family as Firefox. Thus it does not have any problem..

Opera

With Opera, most of the pages display correctly. However, this browser seems to have some problems with the display of some tables, like the home page. But the home page has not been optimised....

Konqueror

The site has not been tested with this browser, as it seems to be a Unix browser, and I do not have access to an Unix machine.

Others

No information available about the other browsers .