Manual

This section aims at giving you a global view of the site and details what you can find in there. You will also be given the possibility to check the last updates and improvements that we will keep on bringing to this site. If you are interested, a page is devoted to technologies used to develop it and set it up.

Structure of the site

Beside the presentation of our bed and breakfast, the site strives to let you know more about Périgord. The section dedicated to it is made of three pages per monument: a historical commentary, a photo gallery and an access map (if one of these is missing, chances are it is still on the way). More details can be found on the sitemap.

I endeavored to make our site accessible to as many people as I could, no matter what browser. However some details will show up in best browsers, and not in others: it’s up to you to choose a better tool!

Functionalities

Here is a list of the functionalities our site provides: your browser may or may not use them.

Acronyms and definitions

Some acronyms and abbreviations appear in the course of the articles, I have chosen to provide their literal development for all of them, from the most obscure to the most trivial, in order for the text to remain immediately understandable to anybody. In the same way, some specialized terms are given special care so that their definition is accessible.

It is up to each browser to disclose such a definition by using a method of its choice, but experience has proved that the simple and common way to do is the tooltip that appears when you move your mouse over a term supplied with a definition.

The point now is to be informed when a word has been given this special care: as shown on the figure, such a word is supposed to be underlined.

Switch to another style sheet

A style sheet is a set of rules given to a browser so that it knows how to render a page, i.e. how to layout the elements of this page, what color each of them should have, etc. Several style sheets can be applied either simultaneously, or exclusively. To switch from a style sheet to another, a browser like Firefox uses a small icon in the lower left corner:

This way you can choose the layout that suits you best. On the figure, only one style is defined (baptised “Glycine”, which stands for wisteria in French), but more will come…

Navigation help

Some browsers make use of HTML tags that order pages of a site. Mozilla and Firefox (with the “Link Toolbar”) extension are two of them:

Arrows allow you to move to the next or previous, first or last page of the site, etc.

Fast access to special pages

Similarly, some pages play a special part in a web site: think for example of this help page, of the glossary, of translated versions of a given page, etc. Here again, Firefox stands out since it provides a simple and efficient mechanism to quickly access these pages:

Note that I included in each page an explicit hyper-text link to its translation so that those of you who do not use a powerful browser as Firefox can still choose the language they want to read the site in.

General look

When the “Glycine” style sheet is activated, the desired effect is that a wisteria transparently shows through menus and texts. One browser that is not able to do this is Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer, even in its latest version (IE 6). At least, the current solution does not do any harm to it…

Similarly, the side menu you can see on figure 5 is supposed to be fixed, even when you scroll the page so that you always have it at hand: IE is not able of that either, that’s why, when you want to go from a page to another, you have to scroll up the page until the menu appears again.

Language negotiation

Behind this barbaric designation hides a cunning and convenient mechanism that allow visitors to automatically choose the language they prefer to browse a web site. This “negotiation” is based on HTTP specification that defines the way a client (your browser) and a server (the tool that sends pages of a site to the client) communicate.

To put it shortly, the client sends requests to the server, i.e. basically asks for a page whose address is for example http://www.relinquiere.com/leisure/climbing. The server receives the request, analyzes it and if it finds the page at this address, returns it to the client. However, the client has the possibility to somewhat fine tune its request by sending headers along with the desired web page address. This way it can tell the server it would rather, if possible, get the page in English, and if this page does not exist, then the French page would do.

How? The client simply needs to send the server the header called “Accept-Language” with a list of appropriate languages. In our example, the list “en, fr” informs the server that English is preferred over French. When the server receives this request and realizes that the client expressed a preference, it will try to satisfy it.

That’s all very fine, but how to give a value to this header “Accept-Language”? The method varies from one browser to another, we will consider two of them. First, in IE, you have to go to the menu “Tool”, then select “Internet options…”; in the dialog box that pops up, click on the “Languages…” button and add, remove or reorder languages as you like it in that second box:

In Firefox, the process is similar: go to “Edit”, then “Preferences”, choose the “General” category and press the “Languages…” button. The dialog that pops up looks pretty much the same as in Internet Explorer:

Figure 7