I've been so busy for some time now running the Facebook group Ancientscoins as administrator with three other admins. It truly is a lot of fun for me now days, as it was tough dealing with drama at times, but hey, who doesn't have drama once in awhile, right? I've also been working on my photo galleries and website which has been a ongoing progress from the early days of my collecting when I started at CCF (Coin Community Family) and then moved here to CoinTalk with the rest of the crew. http://www.forumancientcoins.com/ancientwhitesheet/index.html This site is two years old, maybe three, still early on but I do have a few things here to read and think about. I just released my Ancient Coin Visual keyboard which is a visual aid to copy characters from coins and books, as well as some font sets that have never been added to a keyboard before of any kind. It's useful for detail IDing coins and quick attributions, as well as reading a coin on the fly anywhere you might be. Some font sets don't show on all computers and cell phones. Since this is a new addition, you can expect bugs and issues until I manage to work them out. Font sets currently supported are Greek, Latin, Phoenician, Russian, Armenian, Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, Kharosthi. Kharosthi is a difficult font set to implement because it has transform vowel characters where KA for example, A is inherent so you have I,U,R, E, O. So KA can be KO, KE, KRx, KU, KI. And so the actual merging is the problem and so I'm looking into it because there are a lot of characters that ain't supported, but can be managed by just putting the vowel character right after the main character. For now. http://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/index.php?cat=31399&page=1 Here is my Forum gallery. I've done a substantial amount of work to it because I really love coin galleries and I want mine to be well organized with many coins. Hopefully other people like them too. My Tantalus account, I've only added some coins to it but otherwise I haven't done much with it lately. Here are my grids for those that haven't seen it before. http://www.tantaluscoins.com/coins/grid288.php http://www.tantaluscoins.com/coins/grid356.php I originated from here so I hope that no one is mad at me for not being here for a long time but the truth is that I've been really busy. I said that the last time too, which was around Christmas 2017. I got one coin and two books from Secret Santa and I can't be thankful enough because it was one of the few gifts I received and it made me happy. Not bullshitin' either.
Good to see you again, Gil . Looks like you've been working hard! I think the visual keyboard may be particularly helpful when the kinks are worked out. My understanding of such thing is limited, but doesn't what the user see depend in part on their computer or browser? On my computer the Phoenician, Aramaic, Syriac, and Kharosthi characters show up as boxes (blank) . I'd love to have a Phoenician visual keyboard so I hope it gets worked out!
It depends on what kind of language support you already have. I have nearly everything since I translate often. It also depends on what browser you have. Firefox has problems on some builds showing characters. Chrome works very well. Microsoft Edge, can see characters but there is a right to left cursor problem. Internet Explorer. Does not function right at all. That's what I have to deal with is browser incompatibility and I have solved a few issues already.
I have a Macbook Pro and use Chrome. I checked on Safari and those languages don't display there either, although the problem is slightly different on Safari. Browser incompatibility is a pain, isn't it!
Web page pixel perfect display is always a problem for web page writers because of Graphical Browser (which are the ones almost universally used here) differences. But pixel perfect display is usually not a problem with personal coin galleries or when depicting individual coins online as is done when posting them on this Forum. It appears that most members here utlilze the excellent Forum facility provided free to members there for coin gallery generation and maintenance and it satisfies most needs admirably. For the more adventurous who wish to add bells and whistles - colors and fancy fonts, etc. - to their galleries via style sheets you can purchase stock web page layout templates from inumerable online vendors or, to achieve ultimate owner control and browser interoperability, write your own HTML code and Cascading Style Sheets. Following is a textual Browser depiction of the Home page of a web site I wrote when I was a volunteer Technical Advisor to a non-profit organization that trained severely disabled (mostly deaf blind and those with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy) individuals to become proficient in producing optimally Interoperable web pages - it worked quite well and I think it will be of some use to anyone who would like to explore this further for their own use. Some of the pages and links need to be updated - in fact this posting is a reminder to me to do just that - but most of them function pretty well. If you click on the various links you will see the applicable pages with activated style sheets (and you can see this home page is the same way if you return via the link provided) - or utilize http://jp29.org/index.php for a direct link. Please forgive this lengthy diatribe - it is mostly to satisfy an urge to contribute something to this Forum. WEB PAGE WRITER'S TOOL KIT For producing optimally Interoperable & Accessible pages Last updated: 3 February 2017 Go to the Interoperability Page. Web Content Accessibility (WCA) Information & Resources essential for producing Web pages that are compliant with Web Content Accessibility (WCA) requirements. Go to the WCA page. Web Page Creation FAQ Includes explanations of World Wide Web and Internet terminology and basic concepts. Go to the FAQ page. HTML Editors Comprehensive listings (some with evaluations). Go to the HTML Editors Web page. Screen Readers Information relating to use of Screen Readers and their role in Accessibility. Includes a comprehensive list of available readers. Go to the Screen Reader page. An overview of ISO-HTML The HTML Standard implementation maintained by the International Organization for Standardization. Go to the ISO-HTML page. Semantic Web References & Resources Online References & Resources: RDFa - FOAF - GRDDL - Creative Commons. Go to the Semantic Web page Problems serving XHTML 1.0 Information relating to correctly producing and serving XHTML 1.0 Web Pages. Go to the Problems serving XHTML 1.0 page. HTML-Kit 292 (free). The application HTML Tidy (free) was used to "pretty print" the code. About this page This page was hand coded using XHTML 1.0 (strict) Markup. It is served, using Content Negotiation (via PHP on the Server side), as Media type application/xhtml+xml to XML compliant Browsers and as Media type text/html to MSIE Browsers. The character set is utf-8 (Unicode). The Markup is styled using CSS level 3. It also features RDF/XML for Dublin Core Metadata and RSS Feed generation. This is an XHTML 1.0 (strict) demonstration page. I personally write my regular web pages using HTML 4.01 (strict) Markup and serve them as content type text/html. HTML5 Polyglot Example page The page validates as an HTML5 document served as content (MIME) type html/text. The character set is utf-8 (Unicode). The Markup is styled using CSS level 3. It also features RDF/XML for RSS Feed generation. Go to the HTML5 Polyglot Example page. Serving Web pages Use the HTTP Web-Sniffer facility provided by Lingo4you to view the HTTP Request and Response Header and see how your web pages are being served. Validation results for this page W3C "Why Validate" Document Strict Doctype used for Markup Validation. W3C Markup Validation W3C CSS Validation W3C Markup Validation Service W3C CSS Validation Service WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool XML Schema Validator WDG HTML Validator TIDY Utility online W3C RDF Validator XML.com Syntax (well-formed) checker HTTP Request & Response Header W3C Link Checker W3C Atom/RSS Feed Validation Service W3C mobileOK Checker World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) The original HTML - where we have come from HTML 4.01 Specification Getting started with HTML Recommended list of Doctypes HTML 5 Working Draft A Web Developer's Guide to HTML 5 Standards (Quality Assurance) Character sets & encodings Tutorial XHTML Media Types Notes W3C HTML Home Page XHTML 1.0 Recommendation Cascading Style Sheets Home page Introduction to CSS 2.1 Associating Style Sheets with XML Documents Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Other online Resources ISO-HTML Specification ISO-HTML Users Guide whatwg.org HTML 5 Working Draft WDG (Web Design Group) CSS page WebReview CSS Compatibility Chart W3Schools.com Tutorials Dublin Core Metadata Element Set Beckett's Resource Descriptive Framework Guide WEBAIM - Web Accessibility in Mind Activating Browser modes with Doctype Common fonts for Windows & Mac Validity and Well-Formedness Google RSS/Atom Feed 101 How to Create an RSS Feed W3C Validated Markup & Style Sheets on all pages - Non-commercial and Accessible to People with Disabilities
Oh yeah, lots of people have Forum galleries and websites now days which is a good thing if you ask me because it's going to help ancient coins become more developed in a lot of ways. I know you like working on websites as well as I and many other people. I always hope that I can make a decent, if not the best website that I can manage. Thanks for the post and a lot of information there. I'm going to be reading some of it again here soon as I get a cup of coffee. I know about a lot of those articles and your own website as well. I have gotten your site links from you awhile back, a few years ago, I think.
I agree, and thanks for your excellent post. Just for General Information, and as an example of a coin photo gallery utilizing a Cascading Style Sheet, here is a link to one of mine: http://jp29.org/cgallerysct.htm Consisting of Representative coins cataloged in The Roman Imperial Coinage (RIC), Volume VI. Not all inclusive - just coins from my personal collection.
