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| Robert J Morton |
| About This Web Site | ||||||||||||
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| Email: robmorton@clara.net |
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This Web site is my personal curriculum vitae or résumé. All material in it has been originated by me and is my intellectual property. Its purpose is to give those seeking expertise in my particular fields of experience a feel for the depth and coverage to which I may be able provide them with that expertise. Please understand that some areas of my software development work may be commercially sensitive or client confidential. These are therefore necessarily less well represented on this open Web site. None of the programming code on this Web site is for downloading or use by anybody other than me. It is for viewing only as part of my skills portfolio.
Its Context
Any part of this web site, no matter how large or small, is to be taken as existing only within the context of the whole of this web site, and nothing but this web site.
Full responsibility for the content of this web site is exclusively mine. No other party, such as any who hosts it on the Internet or publishes it with my permission via any medium, is responsible or liable in any way for its content.
It is possible to enter this site at any point in its document network. The point at which you enter depends on the search path you took though the World Wide Web or the key words you entered on the search engine you used. Having read the page at which you entered, you can follow one of its links. You may however prefer to move up this site's hierarchy towards its home page, or even go straight to its home page. This is facilitated by the Up and Home links at the bottom of each page.
This site is best viewed with your browser window set to 540 by 400 pixels. On Microsoft Windows 95 or IBM OS/2 Warp4 with a 640 by 480 pixel full screen, this is roughly the default window size. That is, with a single column of desktop icons down the left of the screen and the task bar visible at the bottom, the browser window fills the rest of the screen with a discrete little margin round it. The text has been tailored for a best presentation compromise between Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Sun Microsystems HotJava. At this window width, the text will be at its neatest when viewed in default size Times New Roman. Viewing with the HotJava browser is best with the text set to 'Medium' 'SansSerif'. However, the site will always present itself in whatever font and type size you have set for your browser. I want as many people as possible to be able to read it - including those of you who need larger type. On my computer, Internet Explorer 4 and 5 appear to make a complete mess of HTML table borders after scrolling their containing document on a 640 by 480 desktop. They also fail to display images contained in table cells. The fault is not with my HTML coding. All the other browsers mentioned above (including Internet Explorer 3) display them perfectly. The problem disappeared when I reset my desktop size to 800 by 600 pixels. This does clear the problem (with IE4 but not with IE5) on the Dell XPS M200s. However, this problem disappeared with Internet Explorer version 5.50.4134.0600IC which is now my preferred browser.
I wrote a search engine applet which lists documents on my Web site containing a given keyword in their meta tags. It allows you to go and view a selected document in the list. With Navigator 4.6 the search results are still there when you return to the search engine, which is what I want. With Internet Explorer they are not. You have to enter the keyword again and ask the applet to search again. The only shortcoming I have found with Navigator 4.6 is that is corrupts applet data arrays if you hit the browser's reload button - see my hits counter applet. Beware of upgrades. I upgraded to Netscape 6 and then had to revert back to Netscape 4.6 for the following reasons. It is in my opinion best not to 'upgrade' software much beyond that available at the time you bought your PC for these reasons. The only browser to this day (April 2001) which presents and handles my web site applets flawlessly is Sun Microsystems HotJava 3.0. However, this does not handle JavaScript acceptably - particularly in framesets with automated HTML forms in which common variables are held in a permanent document in one frame to allow documents which come and go in another frame to communicate through them - see my personal project on alternative energy.Viewing It
Indexing Policy
Machine-generated indexes are notoriously useless. Technical manuals produced by certain large well-known names in the IT industry bear overwhelming witness to this. At least, they do to the poor person who has to use them. Semantic indexing - the only effective kind - can only be done by the human mind. This is because at least half the keywords a user will think of when looking for information on a given subject will not actually appear in the content of the most relevant documents. The relevant content will appear in the form of phraseology, which far more powerfully expresses the notions concerned than would the large keywords thought of by the person seeking the information.
Unfortunately, authors of some commercial web sites have abused this principle by inserting what are called 'false attractors' in their keyword meta tags. These are words like 'erotic' which some authors place in their keywords list to attract more visitors to their site. Search engine operators have realised this and responded by building what they call anti-spamming filters into their indexing robots. These penalise documents whose keyword meta tags contain words which to not actually appear in the body text. They do this either by not indexing an 'offending' document at all or by lowering its relevance rating below what it would otherwise be.
It is in my opinion, under present technology, fundamentally impossible for any automated device to make semantic judgements in the context of an index. This is well evinced by the very latest version of a very well known word processor whose grammar checker often gets wrong the use of 'their' and 'there'. Despite the possibility of being penalised by commercially oriented search engines, I have decided to stick with proper practise for meta tag keyword indexing in this web site. I therefore include relevant keywords which do not necessarily appear in the body text so that academic search engines at least will make it better visible to those seeking the information it contains.
The Email link is a quick way to contact the author. Thank you for visiting this site. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE NORMAL EMAIL REPLY FORM MAY NOT WORK IN SOME BROWSERS. If so, please use the alternative form.
Site Statistics
Part of this site won the Study Web 'Award for Academic Excellence'.
If you find pages slow to load from this site, please try one of the other servers. All servers hosting this site, including the server you are currently using, are listed below in the order in which this site was installed on them.
| Web Address (URL) | Location |
|---|---|
| http://home.clara.net/robmorton/ | London, UK |
| http://users.computerweekly.net/robmorton/ | London, UK |
The last server inserts advertising banners across the top of each page. Unfortunately the banner servers cannot handle framesets properly. Only a few of my project pages use framesets, so this is not too big a problem. For these few pages, please use one of the first two servers listed above.