Enter a word to search for multiple dictionary web sites that include that word.
Enter a pattern consisting of letters and wildcards to search for words.
Valid wildcards are * (matches multiple letters) and ? (matches one letter).
(Powered by OneLook® Dictionary Search)

Word of the Day provided by The Free Dictionary

The TLD of the domain name of this website is .io, which is the country code for British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).  BIOT is best know for the military base it rents to The United States on the tiny island of Diego Garcia.  You can read about it in wikipedia.  Not that it matters, but I've been there.

I/O But apart from it's actual meaning, the letters io suggest the computer abbreviation I/O, which stands for input/output.  Computers only do two things: compute and I/O.  So it is an especially appropriate TLD for a computer-oriented website.

If you've never seen any .io websites before and are skeptical, Google it and see for yourself that there are lots of them.

Windows Internet Explorer users, I recently realized that this page does not look good in IE.  I'm sorry.  The best solution is for you to upgrade to Firefox or Opera.  I'm working on getting the prerequisite hacks to work so it looks good in IE too, but in such a way that they don't distort the presentation in good browsers.

I thought I had managed to tweak the markup and CSS to the point that the pages looked good and nearly the same in both the Firefox and IE browsers.

CSS There is quite a lot of effort being expended in web design and development circles these days on good design practice.  I have joined those of the opinion that the content of the page should be separate from the style of the page.  The content goes in an HTML document with as little markup as practical, and the style goes into either a separate CSS file or is included in the <style> markup tag in the HTML header.

Not long ago, it was common to embed font types and sizes in the markup, and to implement all layout and spacing requirements with multiple nested tables.  Now, each block of text is put in one div block something like this:

<div id="id_tag" class="class_tag"> Text... </div>

php Also, most of the web pages here were originally .php pages, not HTML.  Actually, they were always HTML, as far as your browser is concerned.  But they were php scripts on the server until they were processed to build HTML files.  This gives greater power and simplicity.

But using php to generate static HTML is a little wasteful, so I now maintain the php on my own PC and convert them to html before uploading.

float Also, you may notice I finally got the top three main topic boxes to behave and be contained in the surrounding border.  I'm using Eric A. Meyer's Set a Float to Fix a Float technique.