Some other facts about ACIS

• The system’s interface is separate from the requests processing.  All the screens and email messages are governed by XSLT stylesheets.

  • It takes minutes to fix wording of a screen or an email and update a running system.
  • It can be translated to other languages.

  Originally, Thomas Krichel insisted on using XSLT, while Ivan Kurmanov was strongly in favor of using the Template-Toolkit.  Now, Ivan does not regret accepting Thomas’ requirement.

• All the data exchange with users goes on in the Unicode character set.  All the major world languages are supported by Unicode.

• We tried to make all the web pages generated by the system compliant with the standards: HTML4 and CSS1.

  • Standards compliance is one of our guiding values, but we didn’t consider it a first-class requirement. There are more important things, we believe.
  • We use semantic markup approach where possible.  This gives better accessibility and presentation flexibility through CSS.  But sometimes we use HTML tables for page layouts to avoid costly CSS debugging.