English folk and traditional music on the Internet

Aims and scope


Content

This site is a guide to the most useful Internet resources (largely those on the World Wide Web) for those interested in English folk and traditional music. The coverage of the field is intended to be comprehensive, but the choice of links is selective: I aim to provide pointers to the best and most usable sites. I think I have been reasonably successful in this, but comments and suggestions are always welcome - especially about useful resources I have overlooked. Email me at: webmaster@englishfolkinfo.org.uk. My apologies if I don't manage to ackowledge your email: I do consider all suggestions. On the other hand, please don't email me with questions such as "Do you have a link for [name of singer]'s website?" (if I did it would be on the site), or "Do you know the words of [name of song]?" (you'll find links which might answer this question in the Song, tune and dance collections section).

Many of the links are to other listings and guides which should provide the best starting points for further exploration of specific topics. In the following cases I have had to compile my own listings:

This site's scope is limited to English music, not out of petty nationalism or dislike of other musics, but because English music gets lost in more wide-ranging sites. And this is true of the Web as a whole, as well as individual sites: there are a far larger number of sites dealing with British, or Anglo-American, folk music in general. Focusing on a smaller field of interest also gives me a greater chance of achieving reasonable comprehensiveness. Most of the links are probably to UK sites, but that is accidental: any site is included if its coverage is appropriate.

In concentrating on English music I have tried not to be too exclusive; in cases of doubt I have normally included rather than excluded. I have however excluded sites (magazines, artist's pages, etc) relating to other traditions of music (Irish, Cajun, or whatever) even if performed in England.


Design

This Website is designed as a information resource, and avoids unnecessary features such as large graphics. (OK, there aren't in fact any to speak of, but when I add some they will be small and relevant). It conforms to the XHTML 1.0 specification, but avoids dreadful things like frames (for the reasons cited by the hypertext guru Jakob Nielsen in his Why Frames Suck (Most of the Time)). I am also a bit of an HTML purist: I believe that a mark-up language should ideally code only the logical relationships between items of text - the visual appearance should be left to the user to choose by configuring her/his browser. I am working on getting to grips with cascading style sheets, which now cover the whole of the site.

These pages were developed using Arachnophilia my current favourite html editor, and I hope they are usable with any browser. They have been validated with the World Wide Web Consortium Validator, and tidied up with HTML Tidy.


Page created by Martin Nail. Copyright © 2010 Martin Nail. Last revised 18th December 2010

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