About Us (Site History)
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Kongming’s Archives is dedicated to Luo Guanzhong’s novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi), related games (e.g. Koei’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dynasty Warriors, Kessen II), and the history behind them. Kongming’s Archives is also a place for you to share your Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel and history work with everyone else in the Three Kingdoms community.
Kongming’s Archives content primarily revolved around the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese History (although information and the Han and Jin dynasties is also available), and games based off the Three Kingdoms era. Koei Corporation is the primary game developer of Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, and for this reason the majority of games featured here were developed by them. We are not, however, affiliated with Koei in any way. Kongming’s Archives, server expenses, and opinions presented here are independent of their company (in fact, all expenses come from the Webmaster’s pocket and contributions are submitted free of change for not other reason than to provide you with fun or educational reading material).
For more information on the people who maintain the main site (Kongming’s Archives) and the forum (Scholars of Shen Zhou) please visit the staff information page. For information regarding site policy, or for answers to commonly asked questions, please visit the Site FAQ. To submit material to Kongming’s Archives please visit the Material Submission Page. Other information pages include Site Credits, and Site Content Requests. To contact the Kongming’s Archives Webmaster please email him. To contact the Graphics and Web Design firm behind Kongming’s Archives please visit their home page: Rot3K Graphics and Web Design.
If you have any questions about Kongming’s Archives, or wish to contact me with a bug or display error, please send me an email using this form. If you want to get to know me and the other people behind this site I recommend joining our forum, The Scholars of Shen Zhou. If you want to contact us over a chat messenger like AIM, MSN, or ICQ, please view the staff information page. Some of us have listed handles.
I hope you enjoy your visit to Kongming’s Archives. We are always adding new content (major updates are announced on the home page) and we have enough ideas to keep us busy for years to come. If you want to participate, and your English, Three Kingdoms knowledge, or Web Design talents are good enough to help with one of the sections, please contact me.
Kongming’s Archives’ Foundation
Learn more about me and others who have contributed in some way or another on the staff information page. Kongming’s Archives, in its first form, was born in late January 2001 as a site dedicated to Destiny of an Emperor. Early in 2002 the Destiny of an Emperor site died (though it has been reborn in the new Destiny of an Emperor section), though several months later I started a site to serve as a home for Romance of the Three Kingdoms news. This new site, which I began constructing on February 16, 2002, was named ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’, though a short while later it became known as ‘Kongming’s Archives’, a name by which it still goes today. The name comes from my handle at GameFAQs, which used to be ‘Kung Ming’.
From the beginning my hope was to bring information in the community together into a central resource (an archive) though my goals for the site certainly weren’t lofty. I never expected it to have a readership of more than 1000 a month, though today the number by the same contrast exceeds 100,000. Though I wrote the whole site myself (developed on an Apple computer using Adobe Photoshop and BBEdit, a Macintosh text editor, and managed using Macromedia Dreamweaver) I have received assistance from others who are mentioned wherever they put their hands to work. Jonathan Wu, in particular, was helpful in the Novel & History section. The forums, Scholars of Shen Zhou and Simulated RTK, each have their own management teams, which they could not survive without.
As I have said to many before, there will never be an end of content to add to Kongming’s Archives (which already features nearly 200 MBs of documents and simple media such as screenshots and portraits), and thus the project will never truly be ‘complete’. It will exist as long as it is within my ability to keep it online, which could be for decades to come. If there is anything important to say about Kongmig’s Archives, it is that this site is not the product of one person’s work, but rather a testament to the unity which can be found in the Three Kingdoms community (even if at times it seems there isn’t much to stumble across).
Site Design and Accessibility
Kongming’s Archives is designed according to Web Standards using modern Internet technologies (XHTML and CSS[2] among others). Older browsers such as Netscape 4.7.x and Internet Explorer 4.x do not offer adequate support for these standards. To prevent them from mauling the layout completely for you we have hidden the style sheet from them. If you access the site using one of these browsers you will be presented with the site in the most basic of document formats (example). If you wish to see the site the way it was meant to be viewed (example) please upgrade your browser. Furthermore, thanks to the capabilities of CSS, you need search for no printer friendly versions of pages before selecting the ‘print’ option from your browser. Simply print, and the site will do the rest, stripping unnecessary and irrelevant information (example printed page).
In terms of accessibility, beyond using common sense (e.g. colors which the color blind can tell apart, intuitive menus, a consistent site structure, site map) the foundation design of the site allows exceptional compatibility with screen readers (for the blind). You can also, in most browsers (usually under the ‘View’ menu) increase the default font sizes. As a courtesy, links to external pages will also light up in a shade of red when you mouse over them. If this doesn’t happen, you know you are going to another page inside Kongming’s Archives. If you encounter any accessibility issues, please report them.
We have also prepared three separate themes, each of which provides better accessibility than the last (access using the ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ links in the upper right-hand corner, cookies and JavaScript required). The second theme invites the inclusion of always-underlined links, dark text on light background, larger font size, and link background. The third theme (‘C’) uses plain colors for background and menus for screen compatibility, a larger font, and lighter CSS for display (in the process making it fully compatible with Internet Explorer 5). Switch between them to find the one which best suits your needs and interests.
Copyright © 2001–2023 James Peirce