About Unism Online

History

This site first appeared at Geocities in December 1993, and gradually spanned over several non-commercial sites devoted to special aspects of Unism. However, due to the mutable free hosting conditions on the Web, as well as the changes occurring in the world, Unism Online is bound to adapt its structure to the available resources, and everything can change. The visitors will have to bear ads inserted by provider, since one cannot get rid of them on free sites.

Preface

Unism Online is intended to present a quite definite range of ideas to those who might find them interesting. It cannot serve as a guide to the arts, science, or philosophy in general. There are numerous sites that could be used to access the areas of the World Wide Web covering any particular topic.

The content of Unism Online does not pretend to be right, true, or otherwise distinguished from the rest of the views and attitudes represented on the WWW. This is nothing but a presentation of one possible position, beyond any argument or objection, though it may and should be openly discussed. Everybody is free to make their own opinions, and express those opinions in public. The Unism Online will readily reference any commentaries (either positive or negative), and even present them on Unism Online.

Development

Unism Online is not intended to follow every twist of Internet fashions, global events, or subjective mood. The contents of Unism Online are to gradually evolve, but the core of it will remain the same, though the overall arrangement may change from time to time, to reflect the accumulated demands. All the pages of Unism Online are to be subject to development, and everything may change on any page, except the archive texts in a specially allocated text directory, and the library directory, devoted to the texts copied to Unism Online from other sources. If you want to bookmark Unism Online, it would be safer to link to the Unism Central at

http://unism.narod.ru
http://geocities.datacellar.net/unismcentral/

where you will always find a list of the latest updates.

Any suggestions about the directions of the development of Unism Online, as well as general comments and criticism, will be accepted with gratitude.

Language

One can never exhaust an idea by mere words. Ideas live in people's activity, and any discourse can only be considered as preliminary to implementation. Therefore, the texts on Unism Online should be treated as the hints that may help somebody to catch the ideas of Unism - but may as well remain mere words. It does not matter, which kind of language is used, if there is will to understanding and comprehension.

There is no such thing as a language standard. What a rigorous grammarian would call a mistake may serve to pass the content no worse than perfect phrasing. Please, do not meditate upon the wording. Words will pass, thought will stay. Imagine that you are reading a text in a foreign language; the words of this language may seem familiar - still, they are foreign words, and their meaning should be guessed from the context.

Nevertheless, any language remarks are welcome, and suggestions of a better terminology, phrase construction or other stylistic improvements will be appreciated.

Formatting

The style of Unism Online is to be simple and uniform. Minimum decoration and mostly text will download faster, and there is less risk of browser incompatibility. JavaScript, Java, DHTML, XML and other powerful techniques are to be avoided, since they work differently in different browsers under different operation systems, and a slight change in computer configuration may result in utter unreadability. HTML 3.2 has been chosen for the development basis; however, a few exceptions may be encountered:

1. the Netscape tag style has been chosen for most pages, and some older browsers may be unable to interpret certain "Netscapisms", or lay out pictures and tables in a way different from intended;

2. some pages may contain mathematical symbols, which require font Symbol to be installed; this is not a severe restriction, since this font is always available under Windows, and there are similar fonts for non-Windows computers;

3. historically, many texts have been written in MS Word for Windows, and they are stored on Unism Online as they are, without reformatting; you will need MS Word to read such texts, or at least an MS Word viewer; such viewers are available for most operation systems;

4. style sheets are used in a number of pages, especially where special control over text formatting is desirable (e.g. in poetry); however, styleless brwosers still will be capable of dislaying the text;

5. some pages may need JavaScript or Java turned on, if this is necessary to properly present their contents - such pages are to be specially marked in referencing.

References

Unism Online is not intended to serve as a source of references to any WWW resources. The uneasy fashion of the modern Web is to never keep anything stable, and it would take all one's time to check the validity of every URL on every page. If you find a link that does not work, please, drop a message.

The policy of Unism Online is to copy (mirror) anything relevant from the Web, rather than merely reference it. However, such mirror pages can only contain a very limited selection of what is (or was) actually available, and it is up to the reader, to seek for more information on the topics of interest.