It may be hard to believe but these pages of mine have been up on the World Wide Web for a whole decade. To celebrate the occasion, I decided it was about time that I got off my duff and updated these pages. So for this, the tenth anniversary of my presence on the web, I present the fifth version of my home pages.
Now over the years the web has changed a great deal, and these pages have changed several times to match. Luckily for you, I've found copies of the previous versions of my web pages. Well, sort of. Unfortunately, I seem to have only saved the front pages rather than the whole web sites, but I'm making them available for you to see. Maybe you will laugh at how bad they look now just like I did when I saw them.
As for this, the fifth iteration of my home page, you could say I've sort of gone with a "back to the future" approach. Back in 1996 when they became an official standard, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were supposed to revolutionize the web by allowing the content (the text you see here) to be separated from the style (all the nifty stuff that designers do to pretty-ify the web). The problem was these "standards" were so poorly supported over the years by the web browsers people used to actually view web pages that there was no reason for people like me who make web pages to adhere to them when building web sites. Instead, we went with what actually worked for us - nested HTML tables. But the future is now, and CSS support has greatly improved in the mean time. So I now feel comfortable going from merely dipping my toes in the pool of CSS to what you see now.
Now I'm not saying that things are perfect in CSS-land. As I was developing this new look for my site, I encountered problems with the implementations of CSS in current browsers that kept me from designing things exactly as I wanted. What works well in one does not work well in the others and vice versa. But in the name of forward compatibility, I've decided to tough it out and go with a design that looks good enough in the various browsers at different screen sizes rather than going back to using tables to get pixel perfect results.
Now, those of you who aren't HTML geeks may be wondering, "What is he talking about? This page doesn't look all that special. In fact, it looks lamer than the old one." Well the difference is that now, having gotten rid of all the <table> tags, I can do things like radically change the look of this page without touching the file that contains the text you see here. Better yet, if I build the pages correctly, I can totally change the look of my entire site just by modifying a single file.
Okay, so maybe it's not exactly just a single file. After all, it would be hard to really change the appearance of a site without changing all the graphics that appear on it. The point I'm trying to make, though, is that separating the "content" from the "appearance" like I have here makes changing the site much easier than it was back in the bad old days. It also means I spend a lot less time trying to figure out where I put that mistyped HTML tag, causing the entire page to look funny or not show up at all.
For some examples of what is possible simply by playing around with CSS and graphic images instead of nested tables with spacer GIFs, I suggest surfing over to the css Zen Garden and seeing the possibilities for yourself. You may find yourself just as impressed as I was at how far we've come.