By Thomas Robb
This project has evolved over a number of years. It was conceived by my Seminar which graduated in March, 1995. We had first considered making the project as a Hypercard stack, but then the World Wide Web happened by, and my class projects have never been the same since.
The first effort was rather crude compared to later revisions, done completely in black & white. Here is a sample of one of the first pages.
My seminar class in the following year picked up where they had left off, considerably improving the design. We added clickable maps for each area using a rather complex server-based approach. The design team led by Masanori Kitagawa did marvels with the graphics.
Nevertheless, the new design still had its drawbacks. While an area map appeared as part of each restaurant's information, it was not clickable even though it appeared to be. Furthermore, each page of restaurant information involved making two separate HTML files, making future revisions more difficult.
The current design makes use of frames so that a clickable area map is always present in the righthand frame. Furthermore, all of the restaurant data is stored in a database, the lefthand frame being created on the fly by a CGI program. This will simplify future maintenance since data can be quickly changed in the database. New additions, however, will still require alteration to the regional maps, the addition of the coordinates for the click spot, as well as manual editing of the lefthand pages with the information by area, food type or group size.
Thanks go to my current crop of senior seminar students for extracting the data from the old html pages and inputting them into the database. From now on, it should be smooth sailing.
Your comments are very welcome, including recommendations for new restaurants, or ideas for making the pages more usable.
Revised January 27, 2000