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MCCW issue 91, January/February 2000
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The birth of MCCW
 
Preface 91
Phoenix? Nah...
  

                             Welcome to the first web edition of MSX Computer & Club Magazine! Since you are reading the English version of the preface to this edition, it is possible that you are not Dutch. So it might also be the case that you don’t even know MSX Computer & Club Magazine. If that is true, it might be interesting to read my article called The birth of MCCW. This may also be interesting for the other readers!

                             Okay, now there is MCCW, but we are of course very much dependent on the number of articles we get. And in these days, it is quite hard to gather enough articles for in a magazine. But the difference is now that the magazine has become international, so we can also use articles from foreign authors. These articles should be in English of course, since that is the most international language. And of course, with this medium which enables the entire world to read our magazine, we hope that also a lot of non-Dutch people will be reading our Webmagazine.

                             It may be a bit hard to get used to for the MCCM readers, so we have in this issue also Dutch versions of some articles. And some parts — like Wammes’ kolom, a personal column of Wammes Witkop — are still Dutch-only or mixed, like the ‘Maiskoek’, which we will call ‘Bits and Pieces’ for now.

                             Since this Webmagazine is really a continuation of MCCM, we decided to start with number 91, so continuing the numbering of MCCM. Other changes due to the fact that this magazine is not printed anymore are the use of more colour — which is now priced the same as greyscale! — links and a slightly modified layout. The layout could of course not become the same as in MCCM; the World Wide Web language HTML has its limitations. One of them is that words can not be broken and hyphenated at the end of a line. This sometimes results in sloppy-looking paragraphs. But we have tried to combine the old MCCM layout with the best of HTML.

                             There is more you need to know. We are still looking for — either permanent or not — authors! So, if you have someting interesting to write, please mail me! Note that you can also send us small news-messages for the ‘Maiskoek’ — preferable on MSX — and small advertisements for the same page.

                             Okay, nice, a magazine, but how long will this one stand? Frankly, we don’t know. Ofcourse we can’t continue if we do not receive publishable material. We are honest: there is only a small MSX community left, so there might be a day on which we totally lack articles and have to stop! So, this Webmagazine is just an experiment. We will try to make last at least this year — we still have to decide how many issues will appear per year, but the next one will probably be released just before the Tilburg fair — and then evaluate if we should continue or not. In case we will not continue, we will make a final issue with all the articles we still had left. But then, MSX must be really dead.

                             So, our planning is the we have the second issue released just before Tilburg, the third issue between Tilburg and the summer holidays. We also want to release one around the Zandvoort/Bussum fair and maybe another one. When making this planning we did assume we will get response and articles, especially after Tilburg! If this appears to be not the case, the chance of MCCW continuing next year will be a lot smaller.

                             Given that there aren’t so many authors left and new products to write about we want to make sure there are still articles in the next issue, you should not expect the amount of articles you were used to in MCCM. We decided that a small number of good articles is better than a larger number of articles now which leaves us with nothing but poor quality for the second issue...

                             But, what can you expect from this issue? Well, we have a couple of new series, a fair-report and some pages you can know from MCCM. I’d say: go see for yourself!

                             Of course we worked very hard on the layout and articles. If you have any comments or suggestions, you can always mail them to me or the specific authors. Maybe we will publish some of the e-mails, if they appear to be useful.

                             Oh, and one last thing: I hope you noticed that it is not Frank H. Druijff who is writing this! Frank made me the new editor in chief of MCCW. But of course I want to give him the opportunity to tell what he wants to tell you. That’s why you can read also a preface from him, but it is called Nawoord and is in Dutch. ;-)

                             So, I hope you will enjoy MCCW!

                             PS: I have to thank a number of persons for making this possible, see also the editors list on the contents page. First of all, Frank and Wammes, for their support and help. Second, Maarten ter Huurne, who has been working very hard on the XSLT and shell scripts — yes, MCCW is almost fully automatically generated with the help of XML-conversion and shell scripts! — which made the navigation of MCCW possible. Further I’d like to thank Laurens Holst, Arjan Steenbergen, Arnaud de Klerk, Albert Beevendorp and all the others that gave me very useful comments and hints on the layout. Also thanks to Geert Josten and Egon Willighagen who introduced me to XSLT. And of course, my gratitude goes to all the authors of the articles in this and future issues!

                             PS2: we did our best to let MCCW work on every possible web browser. It is possible though, that some things will not function as intended on your specific browser. Things might be better if you use at least an 800×600 size for your browserwindow and 16 bit colourdepth. We at least tested it for those specifications. If there are big troubles, also contact us, please! One of the things that are really hard to implement is fonts. Fonts are different on every machine and OS. So on some machines the non-proportional fonts may appear much too small and on others they look perfect. We apologise for this; there’s nothing we can do to prevent it. One of the problems is that the ‘kolom’ may not appear as we intended in Netscape 3.01 for Unix and that for some pages you have to do a Reload to let the pictures appear in the right way. Therefore, we recommend to use browsers of version 4 and higher.

  
Manuel Bilderbeek
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