Last modified: April 11, 2000
Web Page Philosophy
Tony Shepp said it pretty well.
This is also on my home page, but it's worth repeating here:
``Home pages are the pet rock of the 90s. We all have
them, we all think they're very cute. But in a few
years we're going to look back and be pretty embarrassed.''
Tony Shepps - toad@pond.com
Consider this page.
It has two GIFs, lots of links, and is reasonably readable.
What distinguishes it from a bad page of the same content?
The same page with a fancy logo
which lacks HTML size controls
and with wallpaper might take 5 to 10 times as long.
The wallpaper would make the text hard to read,
and the logo would have to download completely before the
browser could figure out how to display the text.
Why Are We Embarassing Ourselves?
There are a zillion bad ways to do web pages,
and people are finding more every day.
The biggest problem is that
HTML looks so easy and is so forgiving that one can ``do it wrong''
and it still works.
Sorta.
HTML is far more subtle than it looks, and there are good and bad
ways to do everything.
I suggest avoiding most of the splashy books on it and go for
HTML: The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano and Bill
Kennedy.
It's plain, down-to-earth, complete, and accurate.
Most important, it draws distinctions between the way something
looks and what is is.
Musciano and Kennedy explain the subtle differences and
why they're important.
The book is available from O'Reilly & Associates.
Web Pages That Suck
A great deal of what I know about good web pages comes from
looking at bad ones and thinking ``Oooh, don't ever do
that.''
Vincent Flanders
has taken this idea to its ultimate with
Web Pages That Suck.
Flanders claims that you can learn good design by looking at bad design,
and then goes on to prove it.
It turns out that the gut reaction ``Oooh, this is bad'' isn't enough.
It's also important to understand why it's bad.
Stamp Out Image Bloat!
Support bandwidth conservation.
This entire page, including GIFs, is just under 14,000 bytes.
If you're accessing it thru a 28.8 modem,
typical download time is 5-10 seconds.
That makes for ease of reading.
The largest data file for any of my pages is only 19,705 bytes.
The largest gif is the 95% one on this page, which is 8,091 bytes.
The second largest is the one pointing you to my home
page (see the bottom of this screen), only 1,465 bytes.
Keep your pages simple, clean, and straitforward.
Help stamp out image bloat today!
Other Good Advice
A Personal Note
If you browse my pages semi-regularly, you'll notice they change slowly
but they do change.
Sometimes it's simple format changes (the menu above used to
be a collection of sparse paragraphs).
Sometimes it's grammar and spelling corrections.
And sometimes it's new material.
Plastering NEW! IMPROVED! all over things is stupid
and pretentious.
So I'm not going to do it.
Instead, I'll be putting little notes like Last modified: April 16,
1997 at appropriate locations.
And if the change isn't significant, I won't even do that.
Back to Steve's home page.
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