Welcome

Q: Who are we?

Churchdocs.Org is owned, operated and completely funded by Lutgen Trading. This site is run as a not-for-profit endeavour dedicated to making available the Documents of the nearly two thousand years of sacred Catholic Tradition. There are no ads on this site and we aim to keep it this way, which means that you will never encounter a pop-up window on this site.

Q: Why use this site?

Really, there is a very simple reason to use this site aside from the above. Our focus is more academic than anything else. The documents here have been gone through to make the markup intelligible and clear. This means that searches will produce more precise results. Have you ever searched a site for a single word and the results return entire documents. The pages here are marked up so that a search engine can return results down to the paragraph. Also, the design of the site is meant to make reading easier on the eyes. To this end, the colors and document structure are fairly simple in comparison to others. The materials are the important part of this site, not the blinking lights and excessively large graphics.

Q: Why a site like this?

While nearly all of the documents on this site can be located on various servers on the web, one of the important principles behind this site's development is that these documents should be highly accessible and easily searchable. Also, navigate should be fairly simple. The Vatican has a great site with an amazing amount of information available but finding documents can be difficult and the markup used is rather poor. To achieve our goal, we have decided on some basic principles to guide the site design and document markup. These are:

• The use of java script still causes some browsers to crash so it should be avoided where ever possible.
• CSS 2.1 (2.0) is the latest standard but, sadly, it is not yet supported by the majority of browsers currently in use. All style sheets used should be accomplish their purpose using CSS 1.0.
• End user bandwidth is still limited. Images should be small in size and their usage should be limited.
• Audio files should be both streamed and downloadable.
• 5-8% of the men on the web (less than .8% of the women) suffer from some form of color blindness. The use of certain color combinations should be limited
• Alternative Style sheets should be provided for people with different needs and whose browser (Firefox/Mozilla) support this
• No Frames allowed
• Markup should be done so that text readers/speech synthesizers will be able to make sense of the document structure.

Most WYSIWYG web tools do a very poor job of markup. They are so concerned with how to achieve a certain look that they sacrifice structured, ordered and intelligible markup. Text only browsers and speech synthesizers can't adequately express the graphical distinctions these WYSIWYG editors make in assigning importance to certain phrases or words. Take these two example:

In hoc signo vinces	Good Markup
In hoc signo vinces	Markup from a WYSIWYG editor -- Microsoft FrontPage

Hey, they look fairly similar but, behind the scenes, nothing could be further from the truth:

<h1>In hoc signo vinces</h1>	Standard Markup done
<p><b><font size="5">In hoc signo vinces</p></b></font>	WYSIWYG editor -- Microsoft FrontPage

There is a reason why we have a standard like HTML and its purpose is not cosmetic. Documents should be structured so that they are more intelligible so the premise behind Churchdocs.Org is that the Markup must be clean and meaningful. Luckily, we don't have to sacrifice looks for intelligibility ... we have CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). HTML should be used for structured markup and should tie into css, which will provide a visual layout that allows for an aesthetically pleasing look without sacrificing the ordered structure of a document.