Why Zulu?
There are many opinions on how to create a good website. The following paragraph illustrates the authors point of view:
A good website has the following properties:
- Browser-independent: The website can be viewed using any common web browser.
- Screen-independent: The website can be viewed using various screen and window sizes.
- Printer-friendly: Each page within the website is available in a printer-friendly version.
- Transparent URLs: Any webpage is bookmarkable. A link to a specific page can be sent by email or added to a document.
- Search-engine compatible: Each webpage can be found and indexed by a search engine.
- No frames or scripts.
- Each page can be saved on a local computer.
- Fast page presentation, no links with images etc.
- A good website has no plug-ins, applets, animations or java scripts.
The following considerations are important when creating and maintaining a website:
- Minimized amount of maintenance-labor and -costs.
- Possibility of maintaining the website using any remote
computer.
- No special tools (FrontPage, GoLive, Photoshop etc.) need to be installed in order to maintain the website.
- The website behaves the same whether accessed on the local file system or on the web server.
- Independence of software tools such as 'Microsoft FrontPage', 'Adobe GoLive', 'Adobe Photoshop' etc.
- Layout, structure and content are clearly separated.
- The person updating the content can not accidentally damage the structure or layout.
- Updates to the content require minimum technical knowledge.
- Version control: The website must be compatible to common version control systems such as CVS or Visual Source Save which allow comprehensible change-archiving.
- Possibility of previewing different versions of the website.
- Control over the HTML source code.
- HTML-based: HTML is widely established and won't change significantly within the next years. It is easier to explain the 10 most important HTML-tags to an office clerk than a tool such as 'FrontPage'.
If you share these views then Zulu is probably the right tool for you.