Design Acknowledgements

This set of pages owes much to the insightful essay by David Siegel, Severe Tire Damage on the Information Superhighway, and to his wonderful tips pages. Some of the most obvious ideas I took from his essay are defined height vertical spacing, managed by using a transparent image, indentation of new paragraphs (notably, the first paragraph in any section is not indented. This is by design, also thanks to David Siegel), and the color of links; red not blue for unvisited links, and a dim blue for visited links.
Examples of these are to be found everywhere in my pages. The paragraph indentation can be witnessed in this Design Acknowledgements section. The vertical space control can be seen around the title of this page, above, and between sections in this page. I have used vertical white space control to ensure, also, that titles of sections are closer to the section they pertain to than to the section above. Link colours are also obvious on this page. All of these are common throughout all the pages.

The use of tables to limit the width of the text segment of the page is also an idea proposed by Siegel. I have opted for a standard format of a 140 pixel border in which the buttons are situated, a 10 pixel spacer column, and a 450 pixel column to contain all other contents of the page, except for the copyright, author, and year section on all pages (which should, incidently, be in white), contained in a separate table in the margin below the main table. I chose this format to ensure that text does not end up in hugely long lines if the browser window is resized.

I have only partially followed David Siegel's recommendation that you target one browser and design your page well without limiting yourself by ensuring it works with all browsers.
I have ignored compatibility with Lynx in creating these pages. The pages will show up in Lynx, but they may be slightly confusing as the formatting is not aimed at Lynx users. I designed these pages initially using Microsoft Internet Explorer, then on testing with various versions of Netscape, redid the coding for various segments (mainly the implementation of the menu of buttons on each page relative to the main section of the page) in order to make them compatible with all the different versions as this did not require me to downgrade my design. In this sense, I have ignored to some extent Siegel's recommendations, however I did take them on board.

My choice of background is also influenced by Siegel's ideas. Siegel expresses extreme dislike of 'Netscape gray', and explains that it was a half-way house between white, the best background for text, and black, often the best background for images. He suggests white or very light backgrounds, close to white, for text.
As the contents of my page are almost exclusively text, made necessary by the nature of the project, I have chosen a white background. I chose a background image that gives a pleasant margin on which I have placed the button menu and the copyright information segment, and a crisp white text area. I believe this background suits the page eminently well.

Bibliography

I have included a short bibliography of sources which I found useful when researching for this project, and which might be considered a 'further reading' list for anyone interested in getting more in-depth information and views than I have been able to include in this site. This is not an exhaustive list, however, some of the Web links are to sites with huge lists of links to similar sites, and coupled with the References list, quite a body of material is indicated. The bibliography is listed below:

Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/

Blue Ribbon Campaign, http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html

The International Electronic Rights Server, http://www.privacy.org/

Internet Privacy Coalition, http://www.privacy.org/ipc/

Privacy International, http://www.privacy.org/pi/

EPIC Online Guide to Privacy Resources: http://www.epic.org/privacy/privacy_resources_faq.html

It’s only growing pains: The second annual roundtable on the state of the Internet, Richard Comerford, IEEE Spectrum, Vol: 33 Iss: 9, September 1996, pp. 46-55

The Electronic Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Viewing This Site

This site may be viewed with any browser, however if in doubt, it is optimised for Netscape 2.x and 3.x, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.x. This page is viewable using Lynx, however, it will not be formatted correctly at all. Best results will be observed when viewing with Netscape 3.0 or MSIE 2.0.
Netscape 3.0 can be retrieved by clicking on this link, and installed on any Windows 95 or Windows NT machine. I suggest you install it to drive D: if you are using a TCD machine, and clear some space on drive C: (I suggest removing the directory c:\windows\help and its contents; don’t worry, it gets restored when you restart the machine) before installing it as it requires space to add windows system files.
When viewing, preferably, your browser window should be 640x480 or greater in size.

Navigation

On all pages in this site, there are a set of buttons to click in the margin of the page. The text of one of these will be ‘greyed out’ and it will not be a link. That is the page you are currently on. Clicking on any of the others will bring you to the corresponding page.

General Comments

This project started out with the title "Electronic Security, Privacy and Rights", however, I soon realised that the topic was too broad. After consulting with David Algeo, the course lecturer, to inquire about changing the title and field of research, I narrowed it down to "Electronic Privacy and Rights".
This site is on the subject "Electronic Privacy and Rights", and the new title, "Electronic Rights: Freedom and Privacy in an Information World", was chosen for aesthetic reasons, leaving the field and scope of the project unchanged. "Electronic Privacy and Rights", while encapsulating the topic is a very dry title.