The material on this WWW site consists of photos, cad drawings and text files I have made over the years. All of my pages use basic HTML. There are no frames, no JAVA and nothing exotic. Not that I have anything against those things. I like them a lot and plan to use them in some places. But you don't need to have them for an interesting page. I wrote all of the HTML code in text editors. I try to keep the pages simple so they load fast. I don't think people will hang around waiting for a page to load for more then about 10 seconds. I know I get impatient after that long. Having the thumbnails of the images and text listings means people with slower connections can explore the site without too much waiting. I have also compromised the quality of some of the JPEG images in favor of small size to increase speed. I test the pages with Netscape, MS Internet Explorer and Mosaic to see that they display correctly in each program. This is an important step since different browsers treat html items differently. And some things just don't work. There is a clock display on The Continental Drift Cam that grabs the current time from the US Naval Observatory. Netscape handles it fine but MS Internet Explorer can't display it, not even version 5.5.
All of the photos were scanned on a flatbed scanner and are in JPEG format. The images are 250x400 pixels and 25k on average. (All of the files take up about 9 MB) Most of the small versions for the index pages were scanned separately to get better quality and are about 3K each. All of the photo's were taken by me except where noted. Most were taken with my Pentax MX or K-1000 and a variety of lenses none of which are of terribly high quality. My favorite lens is my 28mm. If you can't get it all in with a 28mm you probably need a wider lens. The CAD drawings were all done in DesignCAD. What you see here are GIF images of the cad drawings because web browsers don't handle vector graphics (or at least not that I know of yet). The GIF format seems to be more compact then JPEG for the cad drawings. The JPEG format is 24 bit color and GIF is 8 bit. Since the cad drawings are 256 color it's a waste to use a 24 bit image of them. The GIF is about 1/4 the size of the JPEG of the same drawing and the quality is better. The JPEG images are 24 bit. I have converted some to 16 bit and can't tell the difference on my monitor. The image on this page is was converted to 16 bit color before it was JPEG encoded. The file size was about 70% of the jpeg from a 24 bit version. The number of colors doesn't really mean a lot in a JPEG. Supposedly the human eye can resolve about 30,000 colors so 16 bit (65,536 colors) should be as good as it can get so far as your eyes are concerned. If you are using something besides your eyes to view the images this may not be true.
-DHP
Files as of August 26, 2002
Total
Type Number Size
HTM 264 1,729,987
JPG 436 5,881,606
GIF 176 1,059,817
PDF 11 195,173
Total 887 8,866,583
Total = 8.456 real megabytes (1024x1024).
There are 2 jpg and gif files for most images, a thumbnail (about 2,500 bytes) and a full size image (about 25,000 bytes).
What do you think of my WWW pages?
Email me with you comments.
dan@pfeiffer.net
Copyright ©1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Dan Pfeiffer
