What's up doc!
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ome of you wil accuse us of not keeping our word and of having failed to update this website at least once a month, as we had

declared in our last editorial.  But you would be wrong, 'cause a lot of things have gone on behind the scenes.  We have been hard at work rewriting the HTML and incorporating Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) into our site.

I must admit that CSS are a wonderful thing.  Small marvels which make a web designer's life so much easier, by allowing you to place text exactly where you want it.  Gone is the need for transparent gifs and tables which were were mainly used to position text.  We can now position text, and graphics, exactly where we want, or need, them.  The coding is simplified, shorter, so that pages load much faster.

Another improvement is External Style Sheets, which make modifications to a group of similar pages much easier.  Until now, you had to modify the code of each individual page.  This was a long, tedious and unmotivating task which was quite a turn-off for updating existing pages.  Now, by modifying the External Style Sheet it is applied to all pages that "call" this file.  Updating and modifying a group of pages is now almost child's play.

There is a small downside to all of this:  Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape have not implemented CSS in the same manner, so that a specific code can give different results, depending on the browser.  Netscape 4.0* accepts only some of the conventions, whereas IE3 supports most of CSS 1.  Even Netscape 4.5* does not accept all CSS 1 specs, but IE4 accepts most of CSS 1 and some CSS 2.  Today, CSS 1 and 2 are an integral part of IE5, whereas Netscape is still lagging behind.  And because of this, our site is optimized for IE.

So, as you can see, a lot of things have happened to our site and the fact that you have not noticed them proves that this is a job well done.  We do realize, however, that changing the look of our site or the code is not enough.  There must also be changes to contents.  So, we are still working on Buffy.  By the way, we have noticed that a lot of you have visited our pages.  Please remember that this is an Alpha version, certainly far from the final version.  Another section which has seen many changes is our portfolios.  The look and navigation has been modified and my portfolio (Spytwo) has been added and augmented.  My husband says my photographs are pretty good and I am, indeed, quite proud of a few of them.

There is a new section:  our Carnet de bord (log book).  This was started as a journal of our move from Montréal to Toronto, recounting our adventures.  For some weird reason, it is one of our families' and friends' favorite sections.  I guess they all miss us.  We certainly miss them.  So we have modified the old editorial and it has become a section all its own, separated by year so as to make browsing easier.  Please note, however, that this section is in French only.

On the PC game side, we have kept our Duke Nukem section even though the game is now quite obsolete.  In fact, I am quite enthralled by Unreal, Quake, Tomb Raider and Half-life etc.  Spyone is quite impressed by the graphic quality of Unreal.  Who knows, he might even get tempted by 3D and mess a little with UnrealEd.

It is my sad duty to inform you that I am removing my F1 section - Formule Spytwo.  We do not have the time or the resources necessary to adequately maintain the section.  Certainly not at the quality level we would like.  There are a lot of good sites out there on Formula One, with up-to-date stats.  The Formule Spytwo may come back, but if it does, it will be in a completely different format and would incorporate comments and opinions, as well as some statistics.

One thing that saddens us in particular is that almost no one has found Waldo.  Yep, Waldo is hiding somewhere on our website.  We had hidden a link to Waldo on our website at our very beginning on the web.  The Internet was brand new to us and we would click like crazy on anything, trying to find links to explore.  It seems that our early enthusiasm to explore the web is not a common commodity.  Too bad, the Waldo link still exists.  If you find it, please tell us about it.

As always, we are planning to keep our site up-to-date and to do at least one major update a month.  It not ideas we are lacking, but time.  With Spyone's new work schedule, we should have more time to give to our favorite hobby, webpage making.

I hope you will like our use of Cascading Style Sheets.  Should you find any dead links or if you have suggestions for our site, please write us at webmaster@SpyTelegraph.com.


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