National Archives Update

I've been contacted by a nice person from the UK National Archives about changes - which may be welcome, since there are reports of problems using the site. The Archive is maintained on our behalf, with all we could need to know about our country, history and families - if you can find what you need!

As someone who is teaching genealogy to new enthusiasts, I am often asked about the Archives and see the shock and horror as users realise how difficult it is, so I am at the front of the queue admitting changes are overdue. Let's be honest; the Archive is huge and no matter how hard you try, huge amounts of information will always take a lot of organising and sorting if you want to find stuff.

Its hard to make something like the Archive easy to use and work done over the years is - for all its flaws - a magnificent effort on our behalf. I want to look at the site and show how you can use it - perhaps not easily - to find the sort of information that may be useful. The obvious place to begin, of course, is right where the links above take us: the main page.

Using the National Archive

Start at the top left. There is a "Family History" section with a nice little picture of a family group. A block below has a similar, but uniformed, group and deals with Military History, which is also useful for research.

Far too many spot the "Search" box and immediately try to find what they want - its like going to the reading room of the British Library and expecting the chap at the third desk from the right to pass you a copy of Radio Times from 1963 so you can check what time the first episode of Doctor Who started! Nice idea, maybe, but its never going to work.

Use the sections - click on "Getting Started" and it will help you use the site and find your way around. Sections advise on collecting information from home and family as well as features and data in the archives - and links to archived records.

Searching Archives

Most people make the error of immediately leaping into census records - understandable, but a mistake all the same. First find birth certificates, marriage details and death records of people you already know about. All those are offered by the archives and links in the introduction section. Note that these are often only indexes to details and full details are held outside the archive - but where that is the case, the index will tell you where the information is held.

Since people usually jump to the census records, that is what I will look at. One huge and obvious feature that leaps out is that the 1901 census is handled differently from the others. First, it can be searched by person, address, vessel (for mariners) or institution (for patients or prisoners, for instance). Other years are searched by country (excluding Scotland). For 1901, there is little more to say. Choose it and you can begin to search.

Shortly after that, you might notice that other years are offered by Ancestry.co.uk - and note it is the UK website, not the international one! Ancestry is a different issue altogether - the part of the site linked to is utterly useless and all it will do is try to get you to join at a cost of almost £100 a year! Ignore where the archive link takes you and click the banner on the Ancestry site to take you to their home page. From there, you can do a search.

At present, Ancestry is also updating the site - but unfortunately, as of the time of writing, the changes simply don't work. Their search does nothing. I will come back to this later and describe how to use it when it actually works! For the moment, take a short while and look at the National Archive - if you have any suggestions for their redesign, let me know and I will pass on your comments to the webmaster there.

Page Design Software

Last month, I looked at site design in House Preston: Doing Design but didn't mention what I would use to build pages and link sites together. Its about time I did, so I'll do that this month. All this was done some time ago - but the blog only went active in March. In fact, all this was done before Xmas 2007.

Design software

Its not some arcane mystery, if you stick to simple principles. Design is choices based on what you want. You can use a "Web 2.0" page like a blog or wiki - and I've done that. The host gives you design you can tweak, like the House Blogs. You just need time and inspiration.

The other choice is "static pages" that rarely, if ever, change. These are all over the web and can all be different if you like. For these, you do need design software to make each look just right.

Modular page design

What the simple choices miss is the idea of modular design, the most common going by the name MVC, or Model, View and Controller. It means everything comes in three parts: the way that it holds together, the way it looks and what it does. On the web, this is often overlooked.

The Model means the organisation of pages and the way they link: your site design. Software should keep track of pages and pictures to check none are "orphaned" or no longer used as well as any which are used but don't exist. Not long ago, when this was the deciding factor, there were three real choices: Dreamweaver, Frontpage or a few shareware applications that could do the same trick.

The View is the look and feel and could use things like the dreaded <font> tag or <table> tags to position bits of the page. If you are still using these, hang your head in shame - they destroy modular design!

Pages come to a browser as text converted into headings, paragraphs, coloured words etc. It works because buried in the browser is and always was a style sheet of instructions how to display tags. Someone thought it would be nice if users had style sheets to change what the browser did. If the user's doesn't have instructions for a tag, the browser goes down to its own instructions - cascades down the list of styles.

Several Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) tell the browser what a page should look like and are designed apart from putting pages together - they are truly modular. This was, in many ways, the final nail in the coffin for the awful Frontpage which Microsoft marched off into the sunset to be replaced by Expression Web but Dreamweaver marched into the future as the only sensible choice, though a few shareware and open source choices were catching up. In particular, one named NVU could manage - just about - the same tricks.

The Controller manages what the website does. Until recently, there were 4 main models for the Controller part of the design. Server-based software known as CGI or Common Gateway Interface can be called by the page and return information. Many pages use CGI, but years ago, Mozilla reasoned some could be software on the browser rather than the server. They added a feature known as Javascript which has become more or less universal. It was named to hitch a ride on the popularity of the use of applets written in Java - which is nothing whatever to do with Javascript. As usual, Microsoft had "philosophical objections" - sheer greed, the rest of us call it - and implemented their own version known as ActiveX objects.

Recently, a new technique has grown in popularity based on Asynchronous use of XML to pass data to a page, to be processed by Javascript. The initial letters give it its name, AJAX, which stands for Asynchronus Javascript and XML and it is the basis for "Web 2.0" pages. With older methods, it tends to be viewed as the be-all and end-all of the Controller, but nothing could be further from the truth!

Design Templates

Commentators forget it is design, not pages, that is modular. Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Expression Web and NVU all had page templates and still do. Often, they are treated as a pattern into which page content must somehow be squeezed. A good and effective use of templates has several elements which make the ideal design software and it is that I want to look at.

It allows - but does not insist on - the MVC model. It can use and edit Cascading Style Sheets for look and feel, link software for page functions and manage links and it carries the MVC model into every part of every page.

A good template tells you which bits can hold content and be edited. It tells you which bits can be repeated. It tells you which are optional. Finally, it tells you which are movable. Some may allow more, but these four are the main things a template should do. If we add those to our list of what a good web design tool must do, we come down to the same old faces - but which should you choose for your own use?

Software selection

There is no way to deny that up there in front is Dreamweaver, now owned by Adobe. It is without doubt the best in the field and should suit anyone with the need for design software and the money to pay for it. Unfortunately, it is a lot of money and for that reason I simply can't recommend it.

Thankfully, despite the odd protestation from Microsoft sales staff, Frontpage is now not merely dead, but rotted in the ground. If you already have it, bury it! If you don't have it then please God do not buy it!

The same can't be said for Expression Web and to be frank it is worth looking at if you are prepared to spend the kind of money Adobe ask for. For myself, I looked at the advertising page with a browser that was not by Microsoft - in my case I used Firefox - and you can see the results in the pictures here.

It took seconds to realise any product which produces this sort of Microsoft-dependent crap is not worth the money.

My advice? Don't touch Expression Web with someone else's bargepole!

Rapidly bringing up the rear comes NVU - which may or may not be as dead as a doornail! This is a totally unacceptable way to choose design software and for that reason alone NVU should be completely discounted from the running, but fortunately it carried on as an Open Source project based on the original NVU and developed from there.

The replacement is called KompoZer and is effectively the latest version of the old software with all its benefits and fewer of its bugs. Together with its unbeatable price - absolutely FREE - it makes KompoZer the natural choice for non-professional designers.

Best of all, you can simply download a copy and try it out. If you don't like it, you lose nothing and still have your hard-earned money to spend on one of the alternatives.