This website is designed for being used easily in three ways. The structure of the website is kept as simple as possible, but not simpler. This and a number of available navigation aids allow reasonable fast access to the content you may searching for, even without providing a detailed site index combined with a search function. The next section describes the site structure and the available navigation aids.
Technically, recent web publishing standards are applied. A straightforward layout ensures nearly the same look and feel on all devices from personal computers over tablet computers to smart phones, e.g. all electronic devices that feature a browser that has implemented HTML 5. How this is achieved in detail, will be briefly described in the final section below.
This website is designed for being used easily in three ways. The structure of the website is kept as simple as possible, but not simpler. This and a number of available navigation aids allow reasonable fast access to the content you may are searching for, even without providing a detailed site index combined with a search function. The next section describes the site structure and the available navigation aids.
Technically, recent web publishing standards are applied. A straightforward layout ensures nearly the same look and feel on all devices from personal computers over tablet computers to smart phones, e.g. all electronic devices that feature a browser that has implemented HTML 5. How this is achieved in detail, will be briefly described in the final section below.
The top level structure of this site features five major categories. Usually, you may have entered the H·I·T·S Engineering website on the main home page explaining under which conditions this website may provide useful content for you. You may have surfed the pages detailing the claims and the objectives guiding the compilation of the content. Because you are currently reading this text, some of the reasoning may have attracted you to take a closer look to the content.
The second category contains some news about my professional activities. This includes announcements regarding major changes to the H·I·T·S Engineering web portal and future public systems engineering conferences, primarily those organised by INCOSE, GfSE and other EMEA region chapters. A larger portion is concerned with the conferences I have attended. From my records, I have selected some information that may be of interest for you. They contain references mainly to plenary sessions and my thoughts and associations I have got when attending them. Don’t expect an objective reporting on the event. If you are interested in that and have not been present at the conference by yourself, please, acquire the conference proceedings and read them. I will concentrate on what you rarely may extract from the conference proceedings themselves:
Of course, here you are exposed to my personal views. And this is indeed what I intend. I am open for your comments. Please, use the contact information published on the imprint page, preferably via e-mail. Depending on the nature of your comments and my availability, I may respond in several ways. I may contact you personally. I may consider them in a blog entry. Or, I may update what I have written, if you convince me for having been too brief or too harsh.
The third category is reserved for disseminating systems engineering knowledge. Here systems engineering topics will be addressed in a systematic way using profound and rational reasoning. Go to the entry page of the knowledge category for a closer look on the topics discussed there. In addition, two further kinds of information will be available. First, I will pick up certain observations and ideas discussing them more in an ad-hoc fashion by individual blog entries. Second, published papers I have authored are disseminated there as far as the copyright obligations allow that. At least, you will find a bibliography with all my paper and tutorial publications.
The fourth category is dedicated to my professional activities regarding systems engineering training and corresponding coaching and consulting activities. If you are interested in a sound and comprehensive systems engineering training programme, I would appreciate to meet you in one or more of my training session in future. For further information, please, browse through the content of that category, and contact me for further information as required.
The last category, about, contains some complementary stuff. I am introducing myself with a CV and some further reflections providing some background information that may answer some of the questions you may want like to ask me. Furthermore, this category features more administrative stuff including this page, the imprint, and the general terms and conditions that apply for training, coaching, and consulting contracts.
Switching between the major categories is easily accomplished by clicking on the buttons of the main navigation bar. The introductory page for that category will open. The button of the major category the current web page belongs to is coloured red. The other buttons are shown in dark blue. In order to satisfy German laws, you find a further link left to the main navigation bar that will take you directly to the imprint page with my contact information and some legal hints. An alternative way to revert to the welcome page is offered by clicking on the H·I·T·S Engineering logo.
Within the particular categories, a sequential and revolving reading mode is provided. In nearly all major categories all pages of that particular category are included in a single sequence. The exception is the category knowledge where the sequences will be defined for the individual sub-categories. A number of standardised buttons allows jumping between pages and within most pages, see the table below.
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Opens the previous page in the page sequence of the current category or sub-category in the current window or tab. |
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Opens the entry page of the particular category or sub-category, or loads the entry page of the next upper category or sub-category. |
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Opens a page with the table of content of the current category or sub-category. |
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Moves the page content upwards to display the bottom of the page. |
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Moves the page content upwards to display the next major heading below and subsequent content. |
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Moves the page content downwards to display the preceding major heading above and subsequent content. |
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Moves the page content downwards to display the top of the page. |
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Opens a PDF file with the content of the page, category, or sub-category in another window or tab. |
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Opens the next page in the page sequence of the current category or sub-category in the current window or tab. |
If you may want to cite some content of this portal in your own products, you may appreciate the opportunity on many pages to load the content down as a PDF file in a printer-friendly layout containing the page content including the bibliographic data. This service is mainly supplied for the pages in the knowledge category. Independently of this service, please, obey the copyright notice and the corresponding laws.
The latest version of HTML (HTML5) is used for editing the content of the H·I·T·S Engineering website. Formatting exploits Cascading Stylesheets in the most recent version (CSS3). No workarounds for outdated browsers are provided. Since those browsers are susceptible to many current security threats, they should not be used for browsing the public World Wide Web anyway. In order to overcome the shortcomings of the implementation of some CSS3 features, a defensive strategy has been chosen to avoid the most recent and advanced CSS3 features as far as possible. Nevertheless, due to the simplicity of the technology exploitation, the page content should always be readable, even if the layout may not be fully compelling under all circumstances.
For the layout, responsive design principles have been applied. The same layout is used for all devices, may it be a personal computer, a tablet computer, or a smartphone. This is accomplished by three means. First, all metrics are related to the standard font size set for the specific device.
Second, no multi-column layouts are used. In case of a rather large high-resolution screen, you may deselect the full screen mode, if the text lines are becoming too long. Or, you may enjoy larger font sizes, especially, if your eyesight is already diminishing.
Third, the graphical layout elements are loaded as scalable vector graphics (SVG). Thus, no switching between different versions of graphic files with different resolutions is required for aesthetic accommodation regarding particular screen sizes and display resolutions. A further advantage are the small file sizes of SVG files compared with all pixel-based formats. Pixel-based formats, e.g. JPEG, are only used for photographs, and then in a resolution that leads still to acceptable quality when printed on paper in A4.
The layout has been tested on a number of devices that are accessible to me. However, I am aware that there may be situations that the content may become unreadable. If this is the case, I would like to learn about, and I promise to do my best to improve the experience for you without giving up the design principles used. Please, contact me using the contact information published on the imprint page, primarily via e-mail, if you have concerns regarding the page layout making the content unreadable.