Lars Eighner's Homepage: General Policies

General Policies

Mission Statement

Lars Eighner's Home Page will represent a whole human being.

Lars Eighner's Home Page will provide unique and original resources to students of literature, students of the creation of literature, and students of the human condition.

Lars Eighner's Home Page will become an economically viable enterprise that recoups the costs of production and World-Wide Web availability and produces fair and reasonable compensation for the labor required in its development, design, and maintenance.

Accessibility

Lars Eighner's Home Page aspires to the highest standards of accessibility. The key word is aspires. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find a single standard of accessibility and I am not sure I have the technical abilities and resources to adhere to any standard.

All documents will validate according to the declared DTD which will be one of the W3C standards. In most cases, that will be the HTML 4.01 transitional DTD or the XHTML 1.0 Transitional DTD. Most of the reasons the present build uses a transitional standard are the result of markup required for the commercial support of this site or of attempts to cater to broken browsers which are still widely used.
All tables will bear a summary attribute. When it is necessary to use layout tables, the value of the summary attribute will be "layout". In the current build, tables have been entirely eliminated from the main layout, except for inherently tabular data, such as calendars.
All graphics will bear an alt attribute. Graphics with any particular meaning to end users will have alt attributes that as nearly as I can manage in a few words convey the sense of the graphic image. Graphics of a purely ornamental nature or minimal graphics used for accounting purposes which have no meaning to end user or which are not supposed to be apparent to the end user will have empty alt attributes.
In the current build, the use of graphic spacers have been eliminated altogether.
In the maintenance cycle a system for providing the longdesc attribute to all meaningful graphics will be established, and when this maintenance cycle is complete, longdesc will be implemented.
At present, Lars Eighner's Home Page uses inline frames, but does not use frame sets. Whenever frames are employed, alternatives for browsers that are not frames-enabled will be provided without comment on the merits of the user's choice of browsers. Every effort will be made to make the appearance of framed pages seamless in browsers that are not frames-enabled.
Lars Eighner's Home Page will use Javascript, mostly for commercial purposes. Scripting that provides content will be accompanied with NOSCRIPT elements that so far as possible parallels the content provided by the script elements.
Lars Eighner's Home Page will use Javascript for various hacks in the attempt to improve the appearance of these pages in graphical browsers. These hacks are necessary because of the varying degree of compliance and support for style sheets. Since these scripts have no effect on content, they will not be accompanied with NOSCRIPT elements. For the most part they will be contained in the HEAD element, anyway.
It is not always possible to provide the functionality of scripts by any other means, and in some cases, such as shopping carts, it probably is not desirable to use alternative means. In such cases, I will aim to make the use of script elements as non-intrusive to users of browsers that are not script-enabled as possible.
Provisions will be made to skip long menus and other repetitive elements in order to reach the content of pages. In the current build, the main content has been moved very near the top of the page.

In the future, I hope incorporate aural style sheets and media-specific style sheets.

Privacy Policy

Excepted as noted below, I do not collect information about users of these pages other than that which server software requires to preform its function. I do not collect or analyze that information for any purpose.

Counters on my pages, when there are any, do collect the following information in the aggregate: referring pages, browsers, screen size. I might make use of this information in designing pages (although I do not do so at present) or in providing reciprocal links to sites that send me traffic.

Some vendors (right now only Amazon that I know of) have the ability to make boxes on my pages contain greetings to users by name. This can be done because your browser contains a cookie that was placed there when you registered with the vendor. Neither I nor the vendor knows that you in particular are accessing my pages. Your browser knows and fills in your name from the cookie it has.

Some of my pages contain public e-mail-to-web areas. The point of these pages is to publish the email sent to them. E-mail sent to those pages will be published, and the sender is responsible for removing any private information from such e-mail before it is sent.

If you attempt to use any feature of my site in the furtherance of copyright infringement, violence toward people or animals, or the sexual abuse of people or animals, I will cooperate with appropriate authorities in providing any information about you that I may have or may be able to obtain.

My pages contain links to vendors and other sites. Consult the privacy policies of those sites for information about those sites.

Copyright & Moral Rights

Lars Eighner's Home Page will not knowingly infringe upon the intellectual property rights of anyone. If you believe that anything on any of my sites infringes on material that you own, please notify me immediately.

If you are the author, photographic subject, or originator of any material on any of my sites and object to the inclusion of that material, whether you hold the copyright or not, I will remove that material upon your request except for material used for fair comment and criticism of work offered to the public.

Lars Eighner's Home Page does not condone plagiarism. Please call my attention to any use of public domain material in a way that does not properly credit the originator of the ideas expressed. I am well aware that some material on my site is sometimes used by students and presented as their own work. I discourage that practice and will cooperate with academic authorities in detecting plagiarism in any way I can. I offer help to aspiring writers in a number of subjects, but I will not knowingly solve homework assignments for students.

Linking Policy

I do not link to Yahoo groups. Don't ask.

I do not link to sites which require registration for their basic function except when the link is for the purpose of acknowledgment. I will link to sites which provide certain reference material to all users but which may require registration for the use of other materials.

My linking policies in regard to adult material is contained in the adult material section of my policies.

I accept very few requests for reciprocal links.

No Spam Policy

I will not spam you.

If you receive unsolicited commercial e-mail that appears to be from me, it may be because:

Someone or a virus on someone's machine is forging mail from me.
Someone pretending to be you has sent me e-mail and I am responding to it.

I cannot do anything about the first, but if the second seems to be the case, let me know and I will take measures to avoid bothering you again.

I run secure software that cannot be infected by the common Windows viruses. Unfortunately these viruses have developed the ability to pose as anyone on the Internet. If you get a virus in e-mail that appears to come from me, it is certainly a forgery.

If you register with or buy something from a vendor advertised on my site, that vendor (according to its policies) might send you product announcements. You should be able to turn off those announcements. If a vendor does not provide a way for you to remove yourself from his mailing list or does not honor your requests to be removed from his mailing list, please let me know. I probably cannot stop the spam, but I can choose to promote a different vendor.

Advertisers

It is not within my power to arbitrate or intervene in any disputes that may arise involving vendors advertised on my pages.

Many hundreds of affiliate programs are available on the web. I have chosen programs that I believe are reliable. Although I cannot accept responsibility for the actions of vendors with which I am affiliated and cannot influence their methods of resolving disputes, I am nonetheless interested in knowing if users of my pages have negative experiences with any of those vendors. I can choose to affiliate with other vendors, and that is what I will do if any vendor proves to be unreliable.

Adult Material

None of my sites will contain material that seems to condone the abuse of children or animals or any nonconsenting person or person incapable of consent by reason of age, mental defect, force, threat of force, or physical restraint. None of my sites will link to sites containing such material or to sites which appear to me to be deceptively labeled or promoted in such as way as to expose children or unwilling adults to violent or sexual materials. Web pages change often and web domains are abandoned or sold to new proprietors, and I cannot be responsible for the contents of any page except my own or for the results of typos in my links. I certainly will not be responsible for secondary links (i.e. links on pages I link to).

None of my sites will offer any special enticements to attract children. All of my sites will contain appropriate filtering codes to accurately describe any page containing material of an adult nature whereby standards-compliant software can be used to block access to any such pages. My pages will not provide any unsupervised points of contact between children and adults or material of particular interest to children. None of my pages will solicit information of any kind from children.

In the current build my pages have three levels of child-filter labeling.

All of my pages will be labeled for strong language, although only some of them will contain it. My pages are not intended for small children. Some of my pages may be useful to older students who are likely to encounter strong language in their other readings, if not in their daily lives.

Some of my pages contain information about sexual practices from an anthropological, medical, or social policy standpoint, and some of my pages about writing fiction have incidental passages of a sexual nature as illustrations of writing technique. Such pages will bear appropriate filtering labels, but will not be apart from my main site.

Some of my pages on one of my sites contain explicit sexual photographs, art, and writing. These pages will all be contained in an adult section and will be individually and generally labeled for their explicit sexual content. There will be no links to pages in the adult section except through a disclaimer page which will be appropriated labeled with ICRA codes.

Lars Eighner's Home Page may contain links to adult sites if those sites do not contain sexual or violent abuse of animals, sexual situations involving persons who are not consenting or are not legally capable of giving consent, or excessive violence. These links will be to the sites' disclaimer pages which have appropriate child-filter codes, and if it is necessary for me to link to pages that depict adult material without a disclaimer page, my page which contains the link will be tagged for child-filter software as if it contained that material itself.

In addition to filtering codes, plain text warnings in the body of documents will be used where appropriate.

Deceptive & Abusive Practices

No blind links. In a site the size of this one it is inevitable that links will become obsolete or that the resources to which they point will change in content or ownership. Some will, of course, be entered in error. Nonetheless, I will not present links that are inaccurately described to the best of my knowledge.

No pop-ups. Many of my links open in new windows in browsers in which such behavior is enabled. In my own web surfing I have become convinced that this is a convenience that allows me to explore links deeply and still return to the site I was primarily interested in simply by closing the new window. Moreover, people who do not like this behavior can disable it in most browsers. But I will not create pop-ups for any purpose.

You control your browser. I will not use scripts or any other means to deliberately alter the function of your browser. I will not hide your toolbars, disable your controls, or cover-up your status line with messages.