Welcome to the Inner Sanctum! The Inner Sanctum was created late in the Winter of 1995/1996 by Michael Ellars, a freshman Architecture student at the University of Southern California. Using the pseudonym "Lord Flieghund," Mr. Ellars began modelling and rendering a ficticious building representative of his personal life experiences -- hence the name Inner Sanctum.
The Inner Sanctum was modelled and rendered through form·Z with Render Zone running on a Macintosh 7500/100 with 32 MB RAM and a 1.02 GB hard drive. The actual rendering consumed about 140 MB per image and required the use of virtual memory of over 200 MB!
Final images are 400 x 300 pixels rendered in 256 colors. The average image size is ~50 KB, though I hope to find a way to reduce this size. The GIF image specification was chosen over JPEG for several reasons, including: 1)the lossy quality of JPEG (not that GIF is all that better); and 2)even though it results in smaller file sizes, JPEG images can actuallly take longer to load on systems which do not have a JPEG chip -- which, unfortunately, is the majority of machines used today.
Navigation through the Inner Sanctum is accomplished through the use of imagemaps. An earlier design utilized a sort of "button bar," but that configuration has been replaced by imagemaps. As such, the Inner Sanctum is not accessible by text-only browsers and will not function properly when accessed by websurfers who have the Autoload Images feature unselected. This is an unfortunate side effect of technology. Yes, that means it's time to stop using lynx and get Netscape.
And while we're on the subject.... The Inner Sanctum is enhanced for use with Netscape 1.1 and higher. It will look crappy with almost anything else, and rather than an attempt to accommodate every browser on the market, I have specialized instead. As of now, the Inner Sanctum is NOT Netscape 2.0 Enhanced, so the majority of people (85% at USC) should be able to access the site exactly as I have inteded for it to be viewed.
Note, however, that certain HTML 3.0 features have begun to creep into the page codes... for most visitors, this should have null impact because (for now anyway) I'm only using HTML 3.0 markups that do not interfere with page layout when viewed by a browser which does not understand HTML 3.0 commands.
Also note that I have made extensive use of Netscape HTML extensions,
most notably <CENTER> and the
<BODY> "suite" of BACKGROUND,
BGCOLOR, TEXT, LINK,
VLINK, and ALINK. Because of this, I HIGHLY
recommend the use of Netscape 1.1 or later to view the Inner
Sanctum.
At this time, there are NO plans for the Inner Sanctum to utilize any Microsoft Internet Explorer HTML extentions. This is a personal decision based on strong personal beliefs. Sorry, no background sounds or marquees in these pages...
This is the end of the Inner Sanctum Information Page... for now. Check back periodically for updates.
M S E D G R T 2 A 2 A E - D I - D F L E S Q D F H E T C -=*aLL NeW CooL iS aLWaYS THe RuLe aT [http://www-scf.usc.edu/~ellars]*=-