About this Site
This site was designed and built by Christopher Bolton in 2007, based on an earlier site by Anthang Hoang '00. Banner images throughout the site are from photographs of China, Japan, and Williams by Christopher Bolton, Cornelius Kubler, and Fumiko Yamakawa.
If you have comments or questions about this site, please contact the department chair at the address listed on our contacts page.
For those with an interest in the design philosophy behind this site, there are some further details below.
Standards
The new site was built with careful attention to web standards and accessibility. It is written in HTML 4.01, without any javascript, and with all the visual formatting separated out in cascading style sheets. If you are viewing this on a browser or other client that does not support CSS, you will not see the colors, page backgrounds, or two-column layout, but you should still be able to see all the information, sensibly organized.
The intent is that the page should support established web standards and be accessible to a wide range of "clients"--from modern web browsers to mobile devices like cell phones, search engines that have to parse the page, and possibly future applications that have not yet been developed. You can learn more about these standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where you can also check this and other pages with their markup validation service. The badges in the footer of this page indicate that the html and CSS for all pages with the Asian Studies banner validate with no warnings or errors.
Accessibility
Pages that observe these standards are also generally more accessible to users with disabilities, some of whom use special browsers or tools. This site also observes guidelines for accessible web pages defined by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and elsewhere. The hidden "skip navigation" link at the top of the navigation links is for blind and physically handicapped users who must step through the page links sequentially; it allows these users to skip the remaining navigation links by moving the browser's focus directly to the main content.
