OpenPA.net

Backend

Shortcuts

Via special shortcut URLs it is possible to quickly access the model page of a particular PA-RISC computer:

http://www.openpa.net/MODEL

Where MODEL is the model-number of the desired PA-RISC computer, for instance 712, 735, B180L, C240, D280, J6000. The browser is then automatically redirected to the correct page in the computers section. All new systems pages are added to the shortcuts mechanism.

Rationale: earlier versions of OpenPA (pre-2004) featured an index page with a list with direct links to all systems pages, which was a convenient way to quickly navigate to information on a particular system. In a large redesign of OpenPA in 2004 this list was removed on the way, since over the time it just got way too large to maintain and did not fit onto the new index page. The shortcuts solution was designed afterward to make direct access to individual systems pages again possible. [However, statistics show few actually use this feature —Ed.]

Print stylesheet

Due to the addition of and subsequent later improvements to the media:print stylesheets the Openpa pages now have a quite useful print-out quality.

External links (i.e. links with an http:// in front to pages which are not located on this site) are correctly annotated with footnotes in the printout. These links are underlined in print and their URL placed in a Links list with their respective footnote number.

The implementation is based on the ALA article: Improving Link Display for Print and makes use of the Footnote Links code from Aaron Gustafson.

The only notable difference from the reference implementation is the positive matching of external links, which are grouped in an a.ext CSS class and selected on this criterion from the Javascript processor. Small changes were also applied to the way links are annotated in the text and later grouped in an ordered list — the original code just used numbers for both, but since some pages on this site already use numbered footnotes (for explanations and references) a difference had to be made in printouts between these footnotes and URL footnotes. The other changes are of cosmetic nature, including prettier display of the ordered list of URLs.

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Statistics

Table: OpenPA Statistics
Year Pages Sections Words Tables Lists Paragraphs
2009 82 (+2 -4) 542 117.126 (+2.04%) 154 1318 903
2008 84 (+19 -1) 551 114.790 (+44,79%) 124 1214 869
2007 66 (+1) 393 79.180 (+4,67%) 63 847 617
2006 65 (+2) 383 75.647 (+1,50%) 63 796 582
2005 63 (+3 -3) 371 74.523 (+6,29%) 63 779 654
2004 63 (+12 -5) 360 70.111 (+21,86%) 62 766 513
2003 56 (+21 -2) 318 57.534 (+84,11%) 58 615 350
2002 37 (+21 -5) 158 31.250 (+300,11%) 88 356 438
2001 21 0 10.413 27 27 31
2000
1999 23 0 2.720 5 0 118

Changes are relative to the preceding year. Data was compiled from CVS checkouts from December 31 of each year. (1999-2000 did not use version control, an old archive was used for the 1999 data.)

Markup and backend:

Table: OpenPA Statistics markup/backend
Year CSS lines <div>/
page
class="…"/
page
Print edition
2009 1237 (+206 -181) 6,38 25,90 2.2 (350pp), 2.3 (363pp)
2008 1212 (+179 -93) 6,36 25,17 2.0 (355pp), 2.1 (377pp)
2007 1126 (+493 -167) 6,42 40,26 1.1/1.2 (267pp)
2006 800 (+67 -26) 6,38 21,94 1.0 (248pp)
2005 759 (+586 -327) 6,40 21,24
2004 500 (+490 -166) 4,44 17,10
2003 176 (+176) 0,05 1,38
2002 Table layout 0,32 0
2001 Pure HTML 0,90 0
2000 Pure HTML
1999 Frames 0,04 0

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