This is a list of Frequently Asked Questions. It includes all sorts of questions about Empires Past, in a completely unsorted order. Remember, you can always e-mail us at (email link disabled)!
For the Aztecs, we chose a teal sort of color for the background because the Aztecs used a lot of jade in their art. For the Chinese, we chose red because red was the imperial color. For Egypt, the yellow-orange color was chosen because of the deserts in Egypt. Finally, a very light grey was chosen for the Romans because the Romans used a lot of marble in their artwork.
In the opinion of the Team, Java is too slow, too buggy, and too unstable to be a preferred development environment, and doing something in Java just for the sake of using Java degrades any site that falls to that level.
There are several prominent empires that people immediately ask about why we did not include them: the city-states of Greece, such as Athens and Sparta, were so drastically different that to write about them would require us to write the equivalent of three or four empires. The peak of the Mongol empire overlaps with the period when the Mongols ruled China (Yuan dynasty). Other than that, the Mongol empire was not much more than a large, efficient military force. The Ottoman empire was excluded because it is too modern: any empire that still existed during World War I is too modern to be included in a site titled "Empires Past".
Aural style sheets are a part of CSS that allows for speficication of audio properties. For example, on compatible screen readers or browsers, the headings, links, vocab words, and regular text all have their own distinctive sounds. This increases the value of the site for a large audience: there are over 750 million people with disabilities worldwide, and a significant percentage of them use the web. For any web designer, it is not wise to ignore such a large audience.
Many people take their privacy and anonymity very seriously. In order to encourage the open exchange of information about ancient empires, we have made the question board anonymous, so that no one has any qualms about asking or answering a question.
Yes. The e-mail addresses are stored in a file which is only readable by the script that handles the e-mail portion of the question board.
The pictures on this site came from several sources: some photographs are courtesy of PhotoDisc, Inc., and they are marked appropriately. Some photographs were taken in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Team. Other photographs came from stock photography CD's that came with Adobe Photoshop. Many of the pictures, however (such as the cartoon-style figures accompanying the small games) were drawn by hand by Dmitry.
A hit is any request to the server, such as one for an image, an HTML page, or a media file. A visit is any time a person loads the front page. Hits count requests to the server, while visits count how many unique people visited the site.
We used a simple text editor, and Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator.
That depends on how do you want to use the information: