www.inf.ed.ac.uk template pages

The original, CVS based, Informatics web site uses SSI (Server Side Includes) headers and footers to give the pages a look and feel consistent with what was the College look at the time. However we've yet to update the SSIs with the most recent styling refresh.

Any web page that is based on the recommended template /template.html will get that look. For those page authors that would also like to use the standard left navigation menu, then use the /template-leftnav.html template.

A bit more detail

What follows is a bit more of the technical detail, which will be of little interest/relevance to most people. You have been warned.

We are moving away from using tables to control the layout of pages, and most of the look is achieved via Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Historically the support for this in browsers varied, but modern browsers are much better and consistent with how they deal with CSS.

Right menu bar

There are the beginnings of a standard right menu bar layout.

To use it, create a <div id="rightnav"> block around the text you want on the right menu. It's a fixed width, and there is a corresponding class="indentrightnav" which you can assign to a following content <div> to allow for it. eg your page might look a bit like this:

<!--#include virtual="/ssi/doctype.inc"-->
<TITLE>About Informatics at Edinburgh</TITLE>
<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/metabase"-->
<!--#include virtual="/ssi/header.inc"-->
<!--#include virtual="/side.inc"-->

<div id="rightnav">
<ul>
 <li><a href="overview.html">Overview</a>
 <li><a href="vision.html">Vision</a>
 <li><a href="contact.html">Contact</a>
 <p>Some plain old text in here
</ul>
</div> <!-- /rightnav -->

<div class="indentleftnav indentrightnav">

<p>Your content here ...

</div>

<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/locationbar"-->
<!--#include virtual="/ssi/footer.inc"-->

If you have problems, contact the services unit via the support form, and we'll see what we can do to help.

Also note in the example above, the use of the "indentleftnav" class, as we're including the standard right "/side.inc".