Our Intentions:

Right Republic's intention is to demonstrate, by irrelevance, that purpose is not a requisite for existence.

Our Design Philosophy:

• Front End Simplicity - The design team at Right Republic endeavors to present RightRepublic.com as a clean, uncluttered, quiet, and professional looking web site. To this end, we constantly strive for simplicity in our presentation, while attempting to maintain a place on the web that is aesthetically pleasing, gentle on the eyes, easy to read, and yet is rich in features and intuitively navigable. This philosophy is the primary reason why Right Republic will not accept outside advertisements, pollute our pages with banners, display any animated graphics, play any music, generate intrusive pop-up windows, or otherwise present anything on this site that we feel may risk being an obnoxious assault on the senses of our visitors.
  
  
• Back End Complexity - Although Right Republic may look simple, as compared to many other sites on the web, the code that is responsible for what visitors see in their browsers is often very complex. The site employs a robust set of UNIX scripts, PERL scripts, Java scripts, Java applets, Cascaded Style Sheets, and a combination of HTML, XML, and XHTML code to create the online experience that it provides to its visitors. By using a wide variety of programming languages and techniques, we are able to create a highly navigable and interactive set of web pages. Such interactivity is demonstrated on our Chess Boards, The Forum, the Fireworks page, the Face Warp pages, and the forms that are processed by our PERL scripts that handle mailings of poll submissions, letters to the Editor, and e-mail messages to various members of our staff, directly from the site, without invoking a user's e-mail client software.
  
  
• Ease of Navigation - Navigation of RightRepublic.com is under constant scrutiny by our design team to assure that it remains as intuitive and complete as we can possibly make it. Our commitment to this design philosophy causes us to frequently evaluate all aspects of site navigation and make improvements whenever necessary. While we use a JavaScript main navigation menu at the top of most of our pages, a text based navigation menu will automatically appear in its place for visitors who are not using Java enabled operating systems. Additionally, this same text based navigation menu appears at the bottom of all of our pages. To further enhance navigability, auxiliary menus appear where and when we feel they are relevant and appropriate in order to provide a quick transition from one page to another when the pages share certain areas of the site. Lastly, a site map exists and is accessed via our "Other Pages" menu selection. The site map is a "navigational safety net" that will allow visitors instant access to any page on this site.
  
  
• Fast Loading Time - Several design practices that facilitate speedy loading are adhered to by the programming staff at Right Republic. These include, but are not limited to: minimizing the use of unnecessary graphics, making repetitive use of graphics files that have been downloaded to a users temporary internet files folder by maintaining a consistent visual motif on all pages, keeping the pages on this site as short as practical, and sharing CSS code between pages as much as possible. Loading is also enhanced by strict adherence to W3C coding standards. Few, if any, web design software applications generate code that validates against the W3C XHTML standards. For this reason, the programming staff at Right Republic does not use any web design software, HTML editors, or any other automatic code generation utilities in the process of creating and maintaining the pages on this web site. Every single line of code is either written by hand using Microsoft's Notepad (a primitive text editor) or it is entered as plain text through a UNIX shell to the server at our hosting company. Lastly, we make every attempt to assure that every page we write validates against the W3C criteria for both XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS. The only exception to this commitment involves the PERL script that generates The Forum. It is a HUGE piece of software that doesn't generate valid XHTML code. We don't have the staff that would be required to rewrite it. The PERL script that generates our Chess Boards is another story. We are in the process of rewriting that program to make it generate valid XHTML. All other pages on Right Republic validate. Any visitor can test any page using the validation stamps that appear in the lower corners on all of our static pages. In addition to speedy loading, valid code also assures greater interoperability across a wide range of browser and operating system combinations, resulting in enhanced accessibility, which will be addressed next.
  
  
• Accessibility - Accessibility is a tradeoff that every Webmaster, who is concerned with it, wrestles with. On one hand, the evolution of programming and mark-up languages, as well as the improvements in browser programs, has provided web designers with a suite of tools that will allow them to use features and functions that weren't available in the past. It is very tempting to employ them and produce "state of the art" web sites that ride on "the bleeding edge" of technology. On the other hand, writing code that is at the very forefront of technological capability may often render a web site inaccessible to visitors who do not have computer systems modern enough to handle the latest developments in code. So, what's a Webmaster to do? Dumb down his site so that it is accessible to the world, only to discover that as time marches on, much of his original code becomes depreciated in the standards and won't be interpreted by future browsers, or design for the best that technology has to offer and leave the old world in his dust? Either way, there will be some visitors to his site who won't be able to display it as he intended. Therein lies the dilemma and a tradeoff must be decided upon if maximum accessibility is the goal. After extensive research into the W3C standards and observance of years of traffic to RightRepublic.com, it became obvious to our programming staff that the most promising way to assure both forward and backward compatibility across the most important combinations of browsers and operating systems was to adhere to three basic design criteria: 1) Design all pages to fit within a minimum screen resolution of 800x600 pixels without a horizontal scroll bar appearing, 2) Code all pages to validate against the W3C XHTML 1.0 transitional standard whenever possible, and 3) Deploy valid CSS code to avoid depreciated HTML tags from being dropped from future browser interpretation. We remain firmly committed to these three design guidelines in order to assure site accessibility as well as highly functional code that will work well for the majority of our visitors.