University of Botswana History Department
History Home Page
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Site index
(Note: although there have been some updates, this is an old page,
and readers will find some references are out-of-date,
as in the concern that a file of a whole megabyte might be a bit large
for some users.)
Contents:
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The History web-site
The idea of a web-site for the department was originally
proposed by Chipasha Luchembe, now at the University of California
at Los Angeles. The first version was launched in May 1999.
Successive updates with corrections and new material have been
added since. The History Department's present web-site editor is
Dr Bruce Bennett, email
bennett@mopipi...
[Click here for full email address].
Comments, suggestions and other input will be gratefully
received.
Originally this site was located at
<http://humanities.ub.bw/history/>.
A site at
<http://ubh.tripod.com>
was initially established as a mirror, but became the only site
as the original <http://humanities.ub.bw/history/> site
ceased to exist for technical reasons.
The "ubh" part stands for "University of Botswana History".
In August 2002, the site moved to this location at
www.thuto.org.
For the present the ubh.tripod.com continues as a mirror.
The original home page, when this site was on the humanities.ub.bw
server, was a page with the file name hist.htm.
However, on the Tripod server, (and also on the
server for the new thuto.org site) the default page
(i.e. the page you get
if you just type in the basic site address "http://ubh.tripod.com")
is always "index.html". This made the old
hist.htm page somewhat
redundant, and the page index.html is now the home page. A
redirection page has been left at the hist.htm URL - we removed it,
briefly, but this led to visitors getting a message from the tripod server
which suggested that the whole site (not just the page)
had disappeared. To avoid confusion we will therefore leave the
redirection page, at least for the time being.
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How to navigate this site
General principles
Most of us will have had the experience of wandering around a
web-site looking for information which may or not be there. For
example, on a University web-site, we might want to find a list of
staff email addresses. Options offered might include "Academic",
"Academic programs", "About the university", etc., and so we try
one after the other. This can take some time when the connection is
slow.
In the History web-site, we have tried to make things as easy as
possible for the user by providing a unified
Site Index. This lists every page in the
site, with all the headings in that page.
The Site Index page is compiled automatically by the HTI
indexing program. HTI is free software and can be downloaded from
this site (see download page).
Using the Site Index
The key to navigating this site is the "Site Index" page,
<http://www.thuto.org/ubh/h-index.htm>. This index
page lists every page in the History web-site, with brief
descriptions. It is arranged by folder. We suggest that, if you use
this site regularly, you consider bookmarking the Site Index rather
than (or as well as)
the Home Page.
(This site index page has the file-name h-index.htm, meaning "history-index".
Unfortuntely, "h-index" is now used for a citation metric. According to what we can
find it was invented in 2005 by a scholar named Hirsch, hence the "H". Thus our
h-index, which has absolutely nothing to do with the citation number,
was here first!)
There are also some subsidiary index pages, such as the
Botswana History Pages Index,
the Boer War Pages index,
or the Books Index page.
Search engine
The thuto.org site includes a
search engine service (see below).
This uses the Atomz.com search engine.
The search boxes on the ubh.tripod.com mirror site access the same
search index and thus return results in terms of the thuto.org
site.
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Standards
Accessibility
Since many of our expected visitors will be using older browsers and/or slow
links, an attempt is being made to make the site accessible to such
users. All pages should be usable for a visitor with a browser at HTML 3.2
level, although formatting may not be ideal.
We would be grateful for comments from users who have
experienced problems or think the pages could be made more
accessible.
We are also attempting to keep to accessibility
standards, and initially did so by using the
"Bobby"
validator of CAST (the Center
for Applied Special Technology). Unfortunately this is no longer
free and we cannot afford Bobby. However we are still trying
to keep to the same accessibility standards. The Internet
provides opportunities for disabled people to access
information, using special technology such as web-browsers
which read content aloud for visually-impaired users. Such
technology, however, relies on web-pages keeping to certain
standards. For example, all visual images should have a
text alternative so that someone who cannot see the
picture still has access to the information it contains.
This is done by including an ALT attribute to each <IMG>
element.
Long-description pages will be provided where it seems appropriate. These
will normally be in the same directory as the relevant images.
It is expected that these pages will normally be accessed through
the "Description" or <IMG LONGDESC= ...> links in the
pages where the image is located.
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HTML
In accordance with our aim of making our site as accessible
as possible to all users, we aim to write these pages in valid
HTML 4.01 (Transitional) according to the
W3C recommendation.
(Until September 2000 we were using HTML 4.0 as the standard, not that
this is a big difference.)
All pages should however render adequately in HTML 3.2.
.
No pages use frames. Pages are tested primarily in Mozilla Firefox
and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, but we try to test at least a sample in
other browsers, currently JanSoft Act and OffByOne.
The "Valid HTML 4.0" and "Valid HTML 4.01" icons indicate that a page has been
approved as valid HTML 4.0 (or HTML 4.01) by the
W3C's on-line HTML validator.
(Note that the icon appearing to the left of this passage
has been marked "sample" to indicate that it is an illustration
and does not actually claim validity for this page.)
There is a problem in the case of the ubh.tripod.com mirror
site, however. As this is on a free web space provider,
all pages carry banner advertisements. The code for these
advertisements is added by the tripod server, and in 2001 we
found that in some cases this introduced incorrect HTML.
Consequently, although a page may be valid HTML on the thuto.org
site, it may become invalid when on the tripod site. Where a
"Valid HTML" or "Valid CSS" icon is displayed, this only applies
to the page on thuto.org. The image file for the "Valid HTML"
icon has been removed from the ubh.tripod.com site, so that
the icon should not appear there.
You can use the form below to submit any web-page to
the W3C validator: just type in the URL (address). (Note that
the "http://" must be included.)
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The W3C on-line HTML validator
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Enter the address (URI) of a
document you would like to validate:
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Style sheets
Some formatting has been specified in style sheets
(mainly CSS 1, some CSS 2),
but in the interests of accessibility all formatting essential to
reading the page is in HTML. The "Valid CSS" icon (see sample at
left) indicates that a page has been passed by the W3C's
on-line CSS validator.
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The W3C on-line CSS validator
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Enter the address (URI) of a
document you would like to validate:
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URLs
Our intention is that our URLs should be all lower-case, though a few
errors have crept in in the past. Directory names can be found in the
Site Index page.
In general, HTML file names are unique, with the following exceptions:
- where a file has been moved and a temporary
location page has been created at the old URL
- the name index.html is the directory
default name recognized by the server, and occurs in more than one directory
HTML files normally have the extension
.htm, with the
exception of index.html,
the directory default page (see above).
Initially filenames for HTML files were limited to 8 characters,
but since about 2004 we have ceased to make this a firm rule.
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Graphics
GIF format is still the most common for small graphics such as
"under construction" signs etc., but PNG format has a number of
advantages - one of which is that it is an open-source standard.
The GIF format uses a compression algorithm which is under patent,
although this was apparently not realized at first.
The owner of the compression algorithm patent is attempting to
claim royalties for the use of GIF.
PNG files are usually significantly smaller (i.e., faster loading)
than GIFs, and the quality can be better.
The main drawback to PNG is that older browsers cannot read it -
you need IE or Netscape version 4 at least. (And even the newer
browsers can often not yet render transparency properly for PNG.)
Thus the principles
of "open source" and "any browser" are a little hard to combine
here. On the other hand, GIFs are mainly used for images
of little or no real importance - decorations rather than
serious pictures, which are normally JPEG - so this problem
may not be considered important. This site uses PNG images rather than GIF,
except for some GIFs from other sites which are used by permission,
such as the "valid HTML 4" icon.
In most cases PNG or GIF images are used for decoration rather than
information - e.g. "Under construction" banners, with the ALT text
"under construction". However there are some information images
where we have used PNG rather than JPEG as a lossless compression
was desirable (mainly screen shots). If any visitors have problems
with these, please
get in touch with the editor at bennett@mopipi... [Click here for full email address].
(We can if necessary provide JPEG or other alternatives.)
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Cookies and privacy
The main thuto.org site does not use cookies.
The ubh.tripod.com site uses cookies - these
are part of the tripod.com free web space
service and have to do with what advertisements are displayed;
we have no control over them.
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Composition of the HTML
Most of the HTML for this site has been coded by hand in text
editors and with HTML-Tidy ("HTML-Kit" version, which is available
free from
www.chami.com
and commended by the
W3C).
In some cases large documents have been converted from other
formats (such as word-processed documents) automatically,
mainly using StarOffice or its successor OpenOffice.
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Design
General structure
This site is essentially an information resource. In order to assist
users, we have aimed at simple and transparent structure. The directory
structure is set out in the Site Index. At present no pages use frames.
Page size
The advice is often given that web-pages should be kept small,
and that it is better to have a series of small pages, with links,
rather than one long page through which the reader scrolls. While
this may be good practice where connections are fast, it is not at
all suitable for pages which are to be read over slow connections.
If there are six small linked pages, the reader must click "Next"
five times and wait for the response each time. When connections
are slow this introduces a large and unnecessary delay.
Consequently, we have generally tried to treat the web-page as a
logical unit, rather than a unit of size. That is
to say, where we expect a reader to wish to read a document, we
have preferred to keep it together so that the reader will scroll
rather than access a new page as he or she continues reading.
However, in the case of the electronic texts of
Missionary Travels and
Native Life in South Africa, the whole-book
files are too large for most readers to open without delays and
problems, and so they have been split into chapter-by-chapter
files.
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Miscellaneous
The date given as "Last updated" at the end of each page refers
to the date of updating the HTML code. The actual date of the
document for other purposes is likely to be rather earlier, and may
be given in the text of the document.
Sometimes, when there is
a slow or poor connection (a common problem in Africa), a
page may cease loading - but this may not be obvious to the
reader, who thinks he or she has reached the end. This proved
a particular problem with long pages such as the bibliographies.
To help deal with this problem, we have recently taken to marking the end
of pages with obvious markers, usually "[PAGE ENDS]" in the last
line.
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contents
See the software page for details on
software mentioned, together with the inevitable disclaimer
notice.
The Botswana History website is maintained and edited by
Dr B. S. Bennett,
email bennett@mopipi... [Click here for full email address],
who is also the webmaster for the thuto.org
site as a whole.
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Copyright © 1999 University of Botswana History
Department
Last updated 23 April 2020. [PAGE ENDS]