The aim of this site is to promote the sharing of family information (photographs, stories and family trees) amongst descendents of the earliest Goalens, hopefully breaking down some fo the communications barriers that occur when parts of the family move away from each other and lose contact.
At first family trees were going to be represented like this:
|
Father b. 1930 |
Mother b. 1940 | |||
| 1960 | ||||
| Son b. 1970 | Daughter b. 1980 | |||
This is a simple example of a family tree generated directly from HTML code. It has been implemented as a table with five columns and six rows. The four boxes each span two columns so that vertical lines can be drawn to the middle of the box edges. The two parent boxes span three rows and the boxes for the children just span one row. There is an associated Cascading Style Sheet mystyle.css which defines functions such as td.top_right { border-top: 1px solid black; border-right: 1px solid black; } to draw lines at the cell edges. These functions are invoked from HTML by calls such as
<td class="top_right"></td>.
The name "top_right" refers to a class of the table data (td) object which inherits all the properties of a table data object but, in addition, has a line at the top and to the right of the cell.
However, this technique rapidly becomes unmanagable and an alternative approach is to use image maps. Although there are a number of ways of doing this, it is difficult to find a way that works on all browsers that are in use today and works across firewalls and on machines that have very tight Windows security settings. I have found that using Javascript image swaps is the best way to meet all these requirements. I repeat pop up text in both ALT and TITLE fields to ensure cross-browser compatibility with Safai (which chooses only to display only TITLE text, when Internet Explorer displays only ALT text). I was very impressed by some example image maps that Stu Nicholls had implemented. However, I have stopped using these because Safari appears to have some bugs in it which which can misplace images positioned by CSS.
If you want your site to be visited it is essential that you have a good Google ranking. However, I had great difficulties in getting my site listed in Google. I submitted this site to the Google index in about May 2006 and it took several months before the Googlebot visited the site to extract the keywords they need. However, when they did visit in September 2006, they chose to completely remove the site from their index rather than to update the keywords to reflect the current site content. At first I thought I had become the victim of the Google Sandbox Effect (like BMW). However, in December 2006, my site was reinstated in the Google indexes - I think if they find a site has changed significantly they blank out the site for several months until they have redone their indexes.