GeoSET Website Design Philosophy
This website was developed mostly using Macromedia Fireworks MX and Dreamweaver MX (mostly in "Code View" mode, due to rendering problems in Dreamweaver), and Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro.
The entire website is in HTML 4.01, a small update to the HTML 4.0 standard which was recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium in April 1998. Most of the pages use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 1 for visual formatting, which was recommended in December 1996. Given the relatively old age of these standards, recent browsers should support them. Netscape 4.x most likely won't due to the enormous collection of bugs in the software (many of which cause it to fail to properly render its own proprietary extensions to HTML!).
This website uses no special fonts that may not be installed on viewers' computers, and attempts to avoid using absolute sizes, except for images and whitespace. (For example, margins of paragraphs are usually 10% of the visible area, but the left side navigation frame is always just a few pixels larger than the GeoSET logo to avoid unnecessary whitespace. The pages are encoded in ISO-8859-1 (the Western/Latin encoding common to most computers in the United States).