About This Website

History

This web site has been in existence since 1997. It started life on Surreyweb, a far-sighted Surrey County Council initiative that offered free web-hosting to encourage community organisations to set up websites. At the time, Striders of Croydon and Tadworth AC were the only other athletics clubs with websites on Surreyweb, and there was only a handful of athletic club websites in the whole of the UK.

The Holland Sports AC website has always been hand-coded (by me) using a simple text editor (Wordpad). For that reason I have always tried to keep it as simple as possible. In fact, I've made it simpler as the years have gone by: I've cut out gimmicks like Java, background music and movie files, and there is no Javascript. For a long time time the website has been formatted using cascading style sheets (CSS), a now well-established and extremely useful web technology.

Browser and Device Compatibility

This site has been designed to be rendered on a Windows PC using the current versions of the world's five leading browsers: Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer. This is because this is all that we have in the house - laptops running the Vista operating system with these five browsers loaded up. It's just too difficult, time-consuming, resource-intensive and costly to check the website and make modifications to ensure that it renders properly with all sorts of browsers on all sorts of hardware/software platforms.

I therefore cannot vouch for the website rendering properly with older versions of these browsers, or with other makes or types of browser such as text-only browsers (e.g. Lynx), or hardware other than the laptops I use in the house (such as laptops with small screens, mobile phones, Blackberries/PDAs and other handheld devices). This is simply a pragmatic decision. My philosophy is not dissimilar to that expressed by Paul Boag in one of his podcasts.

I do however plan to reduce the use of HTML tables for formatting to a minimum in favour of CSS structures in order to make the website more compliant with good practice, which will also make it more readable on a variety of devices/platforms.

Open Document Standards

I support Open Document standards. I now try to avoid using proprietory file formats, particularly Microsoft's, in favour of the OpenDocument format, an international standard for information interchange. This format can be read using a number of open source application programs.

One free, open source, office productivity suite that adheres to this standard and which I strongly recommend as an alternative to Microsoft Office is OpenOffice, which is supported by two leading computer companies, Sun Microsystems and IBM. Regrettably, while the OpenDocument format is an international standard, Microsoft Office - Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc - does not recognise it and so these programs cannot be used to open Open Document files.

PDF Files

The web site contains links to PDF (Portable Document Format) files. These are viewed using Acrobat Reader, which should load automatically with the five leading browsers mentioned above. But, if you need to, you can also download Acrobat Reader for free by clicking here.

Picasa

We have transferred our photo galleries to Google's Picasa, which provides the first 1GB of storage for free and offers lots of useful facilities.

Reporting Problems with this Website

If you spot any broken links or come across any other problems or issues when accessing pages on this website, please email me. Quite often issues are spotted by other users that are not apparent to me, so your help is much appreciated. Similarly, if you have any comments, suggestions or questions, please contact me.

Martin Berry
Webmaster