UnderWeb Guide: About...UnderWeb Guide: About...In buiding this website, I wrote a number of programs which I thought might be of use to other developers, and collected these together into a freeware package called UnderWeb. As its name suggests, UnderWeb is a kind of website 'foundation'. www.mannyneira.com was built on top of UnderWeb.
To the reader, the most obvious sign of this is the 'UnderWeb menu' shown on every page. This lists a number of 'styles' such as 'Black', 'Boxy', 'News' and so on. By clicking on these, you can change the way the site looks. The content remains the same, but is displayed in different fonts and colours, and is laid out differently on the screen. The idea is a little like that of changeable 'skins' which many programs now support.
The advantage can be more than just cosmetic. A different style may not only be more to your taste, it may suit your screen size better, or be easier to read if you are visually impaired, or work more efficiently with a screen reader if you are blind, or be more suitable in any number of ways.
Please have a play. You are currently using the style. Find the 'UnderWeb menu' and try clicking on one of the other styles. You wont leave this page - and if you don't like the new style, you can always try another, or just switch back to .
A detailed description of the different UnderWeb styles available can be read by clicking here.
Web developers will be put in mind of CSS or 'cascading style sheets', and ultimately each 'UnderWeb' is indeed a CSS definition. UnderWeb simply provides a neat way of linking these dynamically to pages so that users may choose which they wish to use. Above all, though, UnderWeb contains tools which allow pages, and the menus linking them, to be defined very quickly and very consistently, wringing maximum advantage from the CSS system. UnderWeb promotes the maximum separation of content and form.
Information on downloading and installing UnderWeb into your own website is here.