Introduction
Chronological outline
Technical notes

This page is also available in French

Introduction

    This personal site, a homage to Hector Berlioz, was created by Michel Austin and Monir Tayeb on 18 July 1997 as a one-page site; it subsequently grew through the addition of numerous pages and sections.

    The chronological outline below charts the development of the site year by year since its creation. In addition, three separate pages chart the progress of particular sections of the site:

• Berlioz Music Scores
• Berlioz: Predecessors and Contemporaries
• Berlioz: feuilletons transcribed on this site 

    For a listing of original contributions and other articles published on the site over the years see the following pages: 

• Bicentenary Special 
• Contemporary articles and events
• Original contributions to this site
• Reviews of live performances of Berlioz’s music
• Reviews of recordings of Berlioz’s music

Chronological outline

1997-1999

Major pages added subsequently: 

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016 

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

Technical notes

    The above entries summarise year by year the additions made to the site since its creation in July 1997. The following notes set out the technical means used to create and maintain the site.

    Initially we used exclusively Microsoft Windows as operating system for our computers (up to Windows 7 but not beyond). Since 2013 we have been making increasing use of other operating systems as well, notably Mac OSX (from OSX.8 [Mountain Lion] upwards), and especially Linux (Linux Mint, an Ubuntu-based distribution).

    For web-editing software we used initially and for many years Microsoft FrontPage (at first FrontPage 97, then soon FrontPage 2000). This programme is convenient and easy to use, but has major flaws and is liable to generate faulty code. At first we were not aware of its limitations, but have since July 2015 completely discontinued its use and have sought to remedy the numerous faults it created; this involved removal or updating of code that was either faulty or obsolescent, and was a time-consuming process. We now rely primarily on Adobe Dreamweaver (Dreamweaver CS6 and also Dreamweaver CC 2015), and also make occasional use of BlueGriffon (currently version 3.01). But we increasingly prefer to work directly in html code, for which Sublime Text (version 4) is our preferred code-editor.

    In addition to the basic creation and editing of web pages and their code, we rely on various software programmes for special purposes: Adobe PhotoShop Elements for image editing, Sibelius for the creation of musical scores and images of them (most scores were made with versions I.4 and 3; images of scores are created with version 6), Zoom Search Engine (by Wrensoft) for all the indexing of the site (version 6). Files are uploaded to and downloaded from the server using FileZilla; other similar programmes are available.

    Initially our web pages did not use any explicit doctype declaration (this was a result of using FrontPage, which did not include any doctype declaration). In February and March 2014 we converted the entire site to Doctype 4.01 Transitional (loose), the format which approximated most closely what we had been using; the move to this doctype required numerous corrections of detail to the code (the apparent non-existence of doctype conversion software makes this kind of task difficult). In May 2015 we converted all html pages from windows-1252 coding to the universal standard utf-8.

    Though very large the structure of the site is relatively straightforward. It has been our objective from the start to make its appearance and presentation clear and simple: the site consists for the most part of pages of text, images, and tables, with a minimum of formatting. It is organised in one basic root folder with over 30 subfolders, each corresponding to one of site’s major sections or topics (archive, concerts, cities and countries visited by Berlioz, scores, writings etc.). The site comprises at present well over 14,000 files in all, of which nearly 6,000 are html files and the rest mostly image files of various kinds (gif and jpg), plus some files with specialised functions (e.g. index files, style-sheets etc.). The total size of the site online is at present over 500 MB.

    The entire site is archived regularly every month and has been since 2005. The archive comprises both working files and files online; it is preserved on several computers, external hard disks, CDs and DVDs. The archives are kept in two different locations, and are in formats that make them readable on all three major operating systems (Windows, Mac OSX and Linux).

    In April 2017, with a view to safeguarding the long-term future of the site, we decided to convert it ourselves from its present doctype (HTML 4.01 Transitional), which we had adopted in March 2014 (see above), to the latest universal standard HTML 5 as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (https://www.w3.org). This involved extensive rewriting of the code for the entire site. Some tags were now obsolete (such as the <font> tag, used to define font families, font sizes and colours), and have to be completely replaced. Other tags, and notably the 3 most commonly used on our website — the paragraph <p> tag for formatting text, the <img> tag for images of all kinds, and the <table> tag for all tables — continue to be used in HTML 5 but the attributes associated with them have frequently changed. For example the tag for centred text <p align="center"> now has to be rewritten as <p style="text-align:center">, and tables are now formatted not with inline attributes but mostly with internal and external stylesheets. The whole process of removing and replacing obsolete code was very time-consuming, since every single html file had to be checked individually on computer and validated online with the validation service provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (https://validator.w3.org). The process took months to complete, as outlined below.

    (1 May 2017) About 500 files have been converted out of a total of more than 5,500, including Berlioz concerts and recent news, Berlioz cartoons, Berlioz-inspired art postcards, the celebrations of Berlioz’s bicentenary in 2003 and all the nearly 400 feuilletons he wrote for the Journal des Débats between 1834 and 1863.

    (1 June 2017) A total of over 1,000 files have now been converted, including the files relating to Berlioz-inspired works of art, contemporary performances and articles, the première of Les Troyens in 1863, his travels in Europe (Belgium, Monaco and Switzerland, but not including Germany, Italy, London, and Russia), Berlioz biography, catalogues and bibliographies of his musical and literary works, first editions of his published scores, and the complete text of his four published books (Les Soirées de l’orchestre, Les Grotesques de la musique, À Travers chants, and his posthumous Mémoires).

    (1 July 2017) A total of over 1,500 files have now been converted, including all the files concerning the Archive of performances of Berlioz’s music, the Pioneers and Champions of Berlioz, the Letters of the composer’s family at the Hector Berlioz Museum, and Berlioz’s travels in Russia.

    (1 August 2017) A total of over 2,600 files have now been converted, including all the files concerning La Côte-Saint-André, Vienne (Isère) and Meylan, Berlioz Libretti and Berlioz and Literature, Berlioz Statues, Berlioz in London (including Friends and acquaintances, and his Report on the Great Exhibition in London 1851), Berlioz Predecessors and Contemporaries (but excluding the files of musical scores).

    (1 September 2017) A total of over 4,500 files have now been converted, including all the files concerning Berlioz Photo Album, Berlioz Music Scores (including Texts and Documents relating to Berlioz’s music, the excerpts from the Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration and the Conductor’s Art, but excluding the files containing actual musical scores), Berlioz’s travels in France, Germany and Central Europe, Berlioz Discography, Berlioz Memorabilia and Bicentenary Special, and finally the Home Page of the site and files related to it (notably Site History and Site Statistics).

    (1 October 2017) During September a further 1,000 files have been converted, including a number of autobiographical articles by Berlioz himself (in Le Monde Illustré and Le Magasin des Demoiselles), articles and studies about Berlioz, notably by Ernest Reyer (in the Journal des Débats) and the extensive series of Berlioziana by Julien Tiersot (in Le Ménestrel), and the more than 800 pages concerning Berlioz and Paris (his residential addresses, public buildings and venues, his career and activities in Paris). With one exception the conversion of the entire site to HTML5 is now complete and every single page has been validated with the validation service provided by the World Wide Web Consortium, making a total of about 5,500 pages of html. The exception mentioned concerns a group of around 500 files of musical scores which are in a proprietary format which cannot be converted to HTML5.

    (1 January 2018) All internal hyperlinks on the site have been converted from absolute to relative links. For example, depending on the location on the site of the file where the link is placed, the address of the English home page is now expressed in code more concisely either as "index.html" or as "../index.html", and no longer as the full "http://www.hberlioz.com/index.html". This change has involved rewriting the code of all html pages on the site, some 6,000 in all.

Back to Home Page