Structure

All pages, except the welcome page, show a navigation banner at the top.  It has two areas:  a set of quick links and a search box.

The little flag shows the language version you will go to when you click the flag.  On English pages it is a French flag, on French pages it is a UK flag.  Not all pages exist in both languages, you will be warned if a language version is absent.

The search box uses Google search but is limited to the GAC-EPA site.  You can type any set of words into the search box, the result is a conventional Google list of links to relevant pages in this site.

The Bulletins

The bulletins are available in two forms:

1. the web form, in which you can search,
2. a pdf of the printed version.

The web form is structured very differently from the printed version, but the information in it is exactly the same or even slightly better.

In the web version there is no mixing of languages:  the entire bulletin is presented only in the language of your choice.  Small errors have been corrected when found and will continue to be corrected, duplicated information (such as addresses and lists of associations) has been placed in separate pages under their own heading and therefore does not appear under the corresponding bulletin chapter at all.  Tributes to deceased members have been moved to the tributes section so they are easier to find, and the list of deceased beneficiairies of the Pension Fund is kept up-to-date, which is of course not the case for the pdf or printed version.  Links to relevant secondary information have been made.  Links are also made to the original version of an article, whether that be English or French.

In contrast, the pdf version conforms to the printed version as distributed by paper mail, it is not corrected and has no active links.  It is provided purely for those who might want to print on paper.

Announcements

Announcements made by the GAC-EPA to its members are kept in a chronological list.  The list can be accessed from the welcome page.  In this list you may find links to the texts of presentations, links to material that was presented to GAC-EPA members by others from outside the GAC-EPA, calls to Annual General Meetings and so on.

Buttons

In cases where there are choices, a table may display buttons.  In the example below there are two columns of blue buttons:

Nr.	Date	web	pdf
38	2009 printemps		(890kB)
37	2008 automne		(676kB)
36	2008 printemps		(721kB)

The buttons in the web column would be the links to the web pages and those in the pdf column would download pdf versions.  Clicking a button would either go to the desired page or download the desired document.

Compliance

The site attempts to comply with the W3C standards.  W3C is the WWW Consortium, started in 1994 while CERN moved the WWW technology to a group of information technology research institutes.

Using the standards and keeping pages simple in structure ensures that the site can be viewed on a large number of browsers, on desktop computers, laptops and on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.  Nevertheless, some browsers do not implement the W3C standards well, and this may lead to some strange behaviour.  To our regret we do not have the resources to adapt the GAC-EPA site to all web browsers.  If you experience problems, try downloading a newer browser version.

If you still experience any strange problem you may contact the webmaster from the contact form.

Bookmarking the site

The welcome page is http://www.gac-epa.org.  This is the most useful page to bookmark:

It shows important announcements and is in both languages, it carries the main links into the site.  It could of course be made more “beautiful” by using roll-down menus instead of a large table listing all choices, but we give priority to usefulness rather than presentation.

Technologies

The site has no frames and no technologies that redirect URLs, therefore you can bookmark any page or send the address of any page to friends.

The site sets no cookies.  However, it does use the localStorage technology to tell your browser to remember one single value:  the text font size at which you prefer to read the site.

Text Size

You can set the size of text at which you prefer to read the site by using the three buttons at the top of the welcome page.

This size will apply to all pages and for all visits you make from that device and browser.

Setting the size will allow those of our members who have less good vision to read the content comfortably.  It also allows you to adapt the text size to the different handheld devices and tablets that you may have.

Though in principle you have to adapt the size only once for each device and browser, you may want to change the text size when you are in a page that is not the welcome page:  (1) click the Home link in the navigation bar, (2) adjust the text size with the buttons on the welcome page, (3) then click the back button of your browser to take you back to the page you were reading, (4) reload the page.

Some content will not fit into small windows, on small screens or when the text size is set to a large value.  Such content will then be partially hidden, and on desktop/laptop devices a scrollbar will appear so you can still see the full content by scrolling horizontally.  On some tablets no scrollbars appear and there would then be no indication that some of the content is not visible.  For that reason, on mobile devices, and only when an element is partially hidden but scrolling is possible, a dashed red border will appear around it.  On touch screens scrolling horizontally of these elements is simply done by pushing them with a finger.

This is an example of a wide table whose content will be partially hidden if the browser's window width is sufficiently narrow: