OpenPA.net

Backend

Shortcuts

Via the use of so-called shortcuts it is possible to directly access the model page of a particular PA-RISC computer. The method for this is using an URL like:

http://www.openpa.net/MODEL

Where MODEL is the model-number of the desired PA-RISC computer, ie 712, 735, B180L, C240, D280, J6000 and so on. The browser is then automatically redirected to the correct page in the computers section.

In earlier versions of OpenPA (pre-2004) the Index page featured a large list with direct links to all systems pages, which was a convenient way to access information on a particular system. With the large redesign in 2004 this list disappeared, since over the time it just got way too large (there just were too many systems) and did not fit onto the new Index page. The shortcuts solution was implemented several months later to make direct access to individual systems pages possible again.

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.

An possible enhancement would be for the script to automatically filter links with http:// or ftp:// URLs in them (i. e. links which point off-site), but the class for external links makes the use of a special icon for external links on the screen media much more easy than it would be with the currently not widely-supported CSS3 support for pattern matching.

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