It was decided to base the page format around the chapter format of the book. This gave each page a managable size i.e. simplified how much content should go on each page, rather than abitarilly dividing up the content of each page. This also simplified the pay per view charging strategy to viewing a chapter.
The content is displayed in a fixed width format as this simplifies managing the content of a page.. The content has been formatted for a screen resolution of 1024 by 768, as most modern computers should be able to display this screen resolution. Users with smaller screen resoultions than this will be able to scroll around the page both horizontally as well as vertically so see the complete content of a page.
The original work was in the traditional book format, which assumed you would be working through the book with paper and pen and have access to other drawing equipment sych as rulers and compasses etc. As this way of working takes the student through the material in a different way i.e. exercises different parts of the brain it was though a good idea to keep this way of working as part of the material. So printable pages have been added to allow the student to work on paper were necessary.
The material in the original book was structured in sych a way as to lead the student through ideas, whilst building on the material already covered. Some of this no longer works so well when implemented on the Internet. So the material has been restructed to try and capture the essence of what was being taught.
The original book containted a fixed set of exercises which only allowed a limited amount of practise of the material being taught. The exercises in the Internet version have been converted to Java applets which dynamically work out questions so the student can continually practise until they have mastered the material being learnt. There were some exercises that had to be implemented exactly as they were in the book due to the nature of the exercise. Also extra practise exercise sections have been added to allow the student to concentrate on the material without having to go through the chapter each time.
The original book was limited in colour range due to printing costs, this is not the case on the web so the colour range used has been expanded to create a more pleasant read of the material.
The normal underlining of links was hidden to make the contents appear more like in the original book.
The original graphics were only licensed for use in the original print of the book. Therefore these have been replaced with graphics from Hemera and some pictures of mathematicians from the MacTutor website.
The pictures from Hemera although royaly free are still the copyright of Hemera, therefore they are only licensed for use on our website. See their website www.hemera.com for how to purchase the right to use their pictures.
The pictures taken off the MacTutor website came with the following copyright message
We do not own the copyright to the images used on this website.
We believe that most of the images are in the public domain and that provided you use them on a website you are unlikely to encounter any difficulty. However, if you wish to use them in any other way -- in "paper" publishing or on a CD for example -- we cannot guarantee that there may not be outstanding copyright problems.
We have not kept a record of where we found any of the images we have used.
If you believe that you own the rights to any of the images we use, please contact us and we will either withdraw that picture or add an acknowledgement.
JOC/EFR August 2001
We will also take the same position with regard to the copyright nature of
these pcitures.
The MacTutor website is http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/
