Each of these is now described in detail.

Loading of Results

There are two types of media on which results can be provided, paper or digital. Digital results can be sent for loading, on floppy disks or as E-mail attachments).

Results are usually produced in electronic form and if the digital form is available, this is preferable, as the results could be loaded directly onto the Internet, with the minimum of manual intervention, to make them available to readers.

There may be some conversion problems in getting the information from several meet-manager systems (e.g. Sports Systems, Hy-Tek meet manager, Open Meet Swimming System by Solent Software, etc.) or from word processors (e.g. WordPerfect, Word, etc.), spreadsheets (MS Excel, Lotus 123, etc.), databases (MS Access, Dbase, etc.) into Internet form (HTML), but once overcome, the information could be transferred rapidly.

Most software formats can be accepted, but please check, if you use unusual or bespoke software.

Alternatively, if results are provided on paper, an optical reader will be used to convert them to digital form prior to loading on the Internet. This process is prone to errors. There are many reasons why the reader and Optical Character Recognition software can misread the results and produce incorrect results. Typical problems include: poor photocopies (that even a human would have difficulty reading) with faint text and smudges. Hairs, Tipex, and scratches on the glass of the photocopier can cause misreading. The use of unusual fonts, italic, use of frames, boxes and shading can cause reader errors. The software is not as clever as humans at making corrections based on the context.

When results are provided on paper, to warn readers that the digitised ones may contain errors, the following red warning message is usually added at the start of the results page:

WARNING: Results were entered by optical reader and may contain errors !

Indexing of Results
The results are indexed to speed access to particular results of interest to the user. By default, the first level of index to results, divides them into Sessions. Session files are usually smaller than 40Kb to speed downloading to the user. The second level index leads to Events (within Session). From there, the user can scroll to the particular results of interest. For Masters, this may involve scrolling through the age groups to find the one of interest. Scrolling is surprisingly rapid, usually taking less than a second from the beginning to the end of the session results. Indexing is done using hypertext links. Indexing is better explained by looking at some actual online results.

If the organiser requires some other indexing, e.g. by age group, sex, distance, stroke type (e.g. all distances of freestyle together), etc. this should be requested.

Searching in Results
Local Searches, within session files are possible using the facility of the user's "Browser" program. Browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer provide a "local find" facility that lets the user enter a character string, such as a persons name, to search through the results. "Find next" can be used to repeat the search for multiple occurrences of the string or name.

Printing Results
Results are formatted so that they will print in A4 portrait, black (or dark) ink on white (or light) background. Where results are too wide to fit on the page, e.g. in 1500m swims where there are many split times, it is up to the user to reduce the font size (by using Browser options) so that they will fit.

Pagination is not good and some results may wrap over pages. A horizontal rule (i.e line) is used to separate events.

The results are made accessible from the competition's "home page" typically by including a hypertext link, appearing like:
Results 1998

Addition to Latest Results List
As well as making results accessible from the competition's "home page", the results are added to the Latest Results List. This lists results in reverse date order, so that newest are at the top of the list. The entry in the list is a hypertext link directly to the results.

Inclusion in the Whats New List
Finally, to help make users aware of the appearance of new results on the website, an entry is added to the top of the "Whats New" list. This list can be accessed from the front page of the website. Again, the entry in the list is a hypertext link directly to the results.

Swimmer Profiles
At a later time, the results are processed with a special program that extracts a swimmers results and puts them into the swimmers profile. As more results arrive the additional results for each swimmer are added to the end of the profile. If video clips have been taken of the meet, photographs of each identified swimmer are also included in their profile. The profiles for Men/boys and Women/girls are stored separately as are those of masters. The profiles can be accessed from the "Age-Group Competitions" and "Masters Competitions" pages.