Welcome & acknowledgement

This is Sinorca, my third design on OSWD.org. It is based heavily on the website of Acronis, a USA-based computer software company. Thus, the look of this design is not original, however the XHTML and the CSS of this page are totally my own work; they were written “from scratch”.

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Alternative stylesheets

There are two stylesheets (rules which dictate the format and layout of a page) associated with this design. The default stylesheet renders the left boxes as a continuous grey sidebar, whilst the alternative stylesheet has discontinuous white boxes. Both of these stylesheets are included in the ZIP file.

If you are using a Gecko-based web browser (eg: Mozilla, Netscape 6+, Chimera), you can view the second stylesheet without downloading this design. Simply open the View menu and select White boxes stylesheet under the Use Style submenu (NB: if you are viewing this page in a frame, you may have to reload this frame is a separate window/tab before applying the new stylesheet).

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Some features of this design

Standards compliant: Sinorca is 100% compliant with XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2 for more consistent browser rendering. The design is also XHTML 1.1-ready, merely requiring an XML declaration and a change of DTD.
Layout without tables: Unlike this design’s inspiration, Sinorca does not use tables for layout purposes. This stems from my personal conviction that tables should only be used to display tabular data.
Use of browser-specific styles: Styles which are perculiar to a specific web browser paradigm are encoded in the stylesheet itself. This ensures that users of Mozilla-based browsers and Internet Explorer see nearly the same design.
Relative metrics: Most measurements (such as widths and spacings) are font-size relative. This means that if a viewer changes the page’s default font size, the document metrics also change to compensate.

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Final notes

I guess the movitation for making this design was to demonstrate that a good-looking website written in HTML 4.0 Transitional and making extensive use of tables could be rewritten in XHTML 1.0 Strict without tables, and not lose too much design-wise.

I hope you find Sinorca useful. If you use this design or derive inspiration from it, please let me know so that I may see your site and share in your design ideas. That is, after all, the basic philosophy of OSWD!