> What I want to know is:
>
> when you type: about:blank
> in Explorer, you get a white page...
>
> when you type: about:anything else
> in Explorer, you get a white page, with the text "anything else"
>
> But!
>
> When you type: about:mozilla
> in Explorer, you get an.... er.... uhm..... "Blue Screen of Death" (in the
> browser)
>
> An inside joke?
Oh yeah, and don't forget to type the last one in Navigator... (For Netscape
fans) :o)
Bonzo
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
kennysfdsgg@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> Been working on a home page, and like everyone else Ive been trying
> to deal with the fact that users vary from 640*480 to 1600*1200
> reslolution.
Really? What makes you think everyone else has that problem? See
http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/wdgfaq.htm#20
> Then I saw the sun microsystems styleguide page, and it doesnt
> have frames (only tables as far as I can tell), and it was able to
> resize to fit my screen even if I change resolutions after loading
> it. How does this work?
A look at its HTML source reveals that they use
for
one cell and no width specification for the other or for the table as
a whole. That width attribute does not conform to HTML specifications,
but it's relatively harmless. The _simple_ approach however is to use
_no_ width attributes for table cells and tables. (And an even
simpler and more effective approach is to try to get cured from the
epidemic though that you must devote a large portion of a page to a
strange god called Nav Igat Ion Al Menus. But when you have real use
for a table, just let browsers format it the best they can.)
Jukka Korpela
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Enderian wrote:
> I have a very large table on one of my pages, and I got to thinking ...
>
> What if the
tag had an optional argument, something like REPEAT=n,
> where n would represent "Repeat this cell every n rows/columns (whichever
> applies)". My table is something like 150+ rows big, definitely bigger
> than one page on almost any resolution. I would like to have the headers
> repeated every once in a while, without me actually putting in the code.
> Any comments?
>
> Further, if I make such a suggestion to W3, what are the odds they will
> actually ponder this for a bit? Any comments would be appreciated. Thank
> you.
You might want to look at the spec for HTML 4.0. Part of it (a part
that, alas, has yet to be implemented by any major browser developer)
introduces some new elements, and
, which a browser could
use to keep headings on-screen as the user scrolls through a long table;
this would solve your problem. Therefore, your effort would best be
spent lobbying broswer vendors to support these new features.
Eric Bohlman
-----
On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Enderian wrote:
> What if the
tag had an optional argument, something like REPEAT=n,
> where n would represent "Repeat this cell every n rows/columns (whichever
> applies)".
[ ]You have understood the purpose of a content-based,
presentation-independent, portable markup language.
[X] Please desist from trying to deconstruct HTML into an oldfashioned
DTP application.
[X] Please join the campaign for better browsers.
Alan J. Flavell
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
[...]
Thanks to those who gave me suggestions. This is what happened. My dear
friend FrontPage took my image and created an overlay with the word BACK.
While I thought I was just adding an image to my page in FrontPage Editor,
it was creating an overlay. So now I have a million overlay files and
all my pages have all these source references that are not needed. What
a mess! Another example of how not to use FP. I corrected a few pages
directly from my server. Guess I'll have to revisit each and every page
to fix it, hopefully I can manually force it in FrontPage and reload.
Michelle Daly
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Snygg och fungerande, men tyvärr lite slö:
http://www.pabulum.com
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Image maps, Server-side vs. Client-Side
What's the general opinion on which is better?
I know server-side is older and .: more widely supported,
but with client-side you can make it such that only portions
instead of the entire image is clickable...
belg4mit@mit.edu
-----
Yes, and client-side is much more accessible because you can provide ALT
attributes to the AREAs which allow non-graphical browsers to navigate
the map properly.
Also, client-side maps can be nicely implemented in mouse-less
environments like TV set-top-boxes. Server-side can't - they have to
simulate a mouse with cursor keys, which is Evil.
Plus, client-side allows a (mouse-plus) browser to indicate what is
clickable, and where it goes, and saves a network transaction for the
redirect.
As for being supported, well, I'm not sure which versions of the Big2
support it (enlightenment, please?), but I'm wondering whether it's
possible to have both to cover all bases - do browsers which support
both Do The Right Thing (presumably, use client-side for AREA hits and
server-side for the background)?. Sorry if this has been obvious for
years - it's only just occurred to me!
Paul Clark
-----
Paul Clark wrote:
> As for being supported, well, I'm not sure which versions of the Big2
> support it (enlightenment, please?), but I'm wondering whether it's
> possible to have both to cover all bases - do browsers which support
> both Do The Right Thing
Yes, AFAICT. I started to make a tutorial on this, but it was never
completely finished. Try
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/imgmaptut.html
and comment if you wish.
By now, I'd say that the only reasons to prefer server-side maps
over client side are if
1. there is some special algorithm involved in processing hits
(i.e cannot be represented as simple AREAs)
or
2. the areas have to be kept a secret (e.g a treasure hunt etc.).
Aside from those special cases, as you say, it is still possible to back
up a client side map with a server side map, and cover all bases. It's
a great pity that the "Phantomimap" contributed module (which was
intended to allow the client-side imagemap data to also be used as the
data for server-side mapping) was not fully debugged. I'm not sure if
it would repay the effort of doing it at this late stage, though.
Alan J. Flavell
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Johnnie ego wrote:
>
>
>No I wouldn't!! Could I just remind you, Mr. Spammer, that the Internet is a
>global medium and what people "ALL ACROSS AMERICA" are doing is of little
>interest to me, a UK resident.
>
>Go away.
WHAT! How does the 'net make it across the water?
REBUS
-----
Wilson, Diane wrote:
> Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> > Veronica Karlsson wrote:
> > > REBUS wrote:
> > > >
> > > >WHAT! How does the 'net make it across the water?
> > >
> > > It's a bit complicated, but basically the electrones are given (for
> > > free! so no extra cost for the Eurpean surfers!) little Gore-Tex jackets
> > > to help them get across without getting wet.
> >
> > Gosh, I thought it was done with two cocoa tins and wet string...
>
>In the USA, we use soup cans instead of cocoa tins, although much of the
>net seems to have switched over to Spam-cans.
And the threads that join them are getting more and more tenuous....
Dan McGarry
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
In article ,
Pedt Scragg wrote:
> Chris Maryan [mailto:cmaryan@geocities.com] decided to regale us with
> >When designing a site for the average Joe, do I need to worry about
> >using things like style sheets or is it a safe assumption these days
> >that 99.9% of the people that visit my site will be using MSIE 3+ or
> >Netscape 4+ and hence will be able to use the style sheets?
> >In other words:
> >Is old-browser compatability a major issue with the use of style sheets?
> >
> Usage of browsers that support style sheets will vary depending on your
> site content.
>
> Two sites I maintain have very variable browser usage:
> Holiday site is 90.7% IE3+ and NN4+
> Walking information site is only 65.4% of above browsers
>
> I'd go with making the site visible even if style sheets are not
> supported - you can at least hide the style sheet behind comment markers
> in html. IMHO everyone visiting a site should be able to read the
> content.
I'd be more concerned about browsers which claim to support style sheets
than those that don't. Browsers which don't support style sheets should
degrade gracefully. Unless you do anything which is dependent on style sheets
to be readable, you should be fine. Your pages may not look as pretty, but
they should work ok.
On the other hand, browsers which claim to support style sheets all do
it to different degrees, and suffer from a multitude of bugs, which
makes it difficult to create anything more than a very simple style
sheet and have it work reliably in most style sheet capable browsers.
IE 3 for Windows and IE 3.1 - 4.5 on the Mac are the worst culprits of
style sheet bugs and lack of support, while Netscape 4 on all platforms
also suffers from a good deal of problems with style sheet support (in
addition, turning Javascript off on Netscape means the visitor will
automatically have style sheets turned off as well, so the number of
Netscape 4 viewers without style sheets enabled is probably much higher
than you'd expect). I've found that Web Review's Style Sheet Reference
Guide is a good starting point for figuring out what stuff is dangerous
to use, and if you choose to use anything marked buggy, definitely make
sure to check it in as many browsers as possible. I spent a lot of time
getting a fairly simple style sheet tested in the major style sheet capable
browsers, and went live with it, only to find out that although it was
viewable in Netscape 4 under Windows, it would not print properly. So there
are some words of warning for you. The reference is at:
http://webreview.com/wr/pub/guides/style/style.html
Good luck!
Cari D. Burstein
-----
In article ,
netaddict_houston@yahoo.com wrote:
> Old browser compatibility is not a problem with style sheets. They
> render the document just like they would ordinarily, while the newer
> CSS-capable browsers render with the CSS presentation hints. Either
> way, the content gets through.
>
> And no, it's not a safe assumption. As a World Wide Web site designer,
> your pages should be usable on all browsers (there are *many* more
> than two).
There is an interesting article on workarounds on A List Apart ...
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/fear/
Worth a look at how to make the poor implementaions of Netscape and
Microsoft to work for you.
While you're at it - browse on over to The Web Standards Project:
http://www.webstandards.org/
Joe Crawford
-----
> http://www.alistapart.com/stories/fear/
I found it extremely amusing to check out this site, and find that the
text under the title graphic was unreadable (did the bad letterspacing
thing). Thanks, style sheets! IE 3.01/Mac.
And that's why I'm reluctant to use style sheets. It doesn't save me time
if I have to have an alternate version. They don't degrade gracefully,
from what I've seen.
John Kestner
-----
John Kestner wrote:
> ...
> > http://www.alistapart.com/stories/fear/
>
> I found it extremely amusing to check out this site, and find that the
> text under the title graphic was unreadable (did the bad letterspacing
> thing). Thanks, style sheets! IE 3.01/Mac.
A real shame that IE3 wasn't released with a self-destruct option.
Arguably the worst CSS deployment (on Win or Mac), this UA set back
style sheets immeasurably, promoting - if you can believe it - the
notion that incredibly bad rendering is somehow the 'fault' of the CSS
recommendation, rather than an incredibly flawed implementation.
Sue Sims
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
See http://www.verso.com/agitprop/dir.html and particularly
"why points suck" and "the amazing em unit".
The font size chosen by the user as a comfortable default (1 em)
provides more truly useful information about the rendering
environment than all the resolution-sniffing, window-querying,
"open-this-wide" logic you can throw at the problem.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Something that is significantly smaller than the smallest size that is
still convenient to read is, by definition, hard to read especially in
large quantities. When the font size get noticeably smaller than that,
you're effectively saying just "I have some text here". The user
_might_ enlargen the font to see it, but he would need some special
reason to do that.
Jukka Korpela
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Rob wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone can tell me how to turn off "Show source" for
> a page?
Attach the following sequence of HTML programming commands to the bottom of
your page:
Attention! If you use the "show source" command, I
will come to your house and beat you up.
---Rob
That's about the most effective way.
miguel
-------
How about a pop-up that says:
"Retrieveing your name, address, phone number and credit card number".
"Now tracking your actions"
[OK]
REBUS
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Subject: Re: What do you call the opposite of a "purist"?
miko@idocs.com wrote previously:
|The subject line sounds like a setup for a joke, but actually I'm serious.
|I'm writing a piece in which I describe the ubiquitous c.i.w.a.h. debate. I
|describe the "purists", but then I lack a good term for the oppositists.
My thesaurus would point to either "contaminator" or "corruptor" as two
straightforward choices. Both seem well to describe those who argue
against the (mythical) purists on this group.
Yours, Lulu...
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
> You have a virtual desktop on your PC? (If yes, where can I get one?)
Mine's called olvwm, and came on a '96 Slackware CD (which offered several
other perfectly good choices too). I'm sure you can find a selection
available for download from, for example, a sunsite.
--
Nick Kew
-----
> You have a virtual desktop on your PC? (If yes, where can I get one?)
You are obviously looking for Enlightenment; find it on any sunsite.
Ben.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
David R. Newman wrote:
>More seriously, I think it should be a compulsory part of every web design
>course to include a session where you have to browse pages with a blindfold
>and a speech synthesiser, or wearing spectacles that simulate astigmatism,
>tunnel vision or whatever.
Here's a good resource:
catnip
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Rupe wrote:
>
> I looked through some articles on this page and have found a similar
> question but not the answer I am looking for... need more help... I have
> taken html classes, Photo Shop classes, web page design classes and have
> been developing my own page for over a year, but still I lack the degree
> of quality that gets people buzzing about my page.
Well, I think you're definitely on the right path. You have taken the
trouble to learn the underlying technology, which will stand you in good
stead for the future.
> A recent acquaintance
> of mine who is a web master making good money on the internet recommends
> Front Page, but I have heard mixed opinions..
I think if you use FP, or any other 'WYSIWYG' editor, you'll be wasting
your hard-won knowledge. It's all very well for simple sites (which
tend to end up with an 'FP look'), but if you know the nitty-gritty, use
it - you'll get further in the end.
What you need now is good content - you probably already know enough
technical stuff to produce a high-quality attractive site, so I suggest
you just jump in and do it. You could just use a text editor to write
the HTML, or you could use one of the HTML editors that assists you with
structure. Either way, make sure you remain in full control of the HTML
generated - there is no better way to learn what it really means.
> Do I need to learn JAVA,
> CGI, C, C++, Pearl or whatever to design quality WEB pages, or are there
> web authoring tools that can do this for me?
As far as I know, there are no tools that can do server side things for
you (CGI, C, Perl), although there are some that will help with
not-very-portable client-side things (e.g. DreamWeaver, FP again). If
you want to become a proficient Webmaster, at some point you'll have to
learn CGI and Perl. It's quite easy to start, but takes years to become
expert at.
For now, though, I'd concentrate on honing your HTML skills - learn what
it really means, and the issues involved in how it is used [*]. Learn
what is needed to produce attractive, efficient Web graphics. Learn the
hardest lesson of all, which is how to generate content which people
actually want to see.
If you can do all that, you'll be way ahead of someone who relies on
FrontPage to do it for them - it's like the difference between an artist
who understands their materials and someone with a painting-by-numbers
kit. Both can produce apparently attractive results, but the only the
artist has any power to really express themselves and produce quality
results that stand the test of time.
P.
[* For my personal view of these issues, may I take the liberty of
suggesting: http://www.sysmag.com/web/html-style.html ]
Paul Clark
-------------
Quality is a nebulous trait and since you didn't post any specifics or
a sample web site to review, I'll have to speak in generalities.
First, you need to face the possibility that you will never be
satisfied with your attempts at web design. Many people can't draw,
or ski or play the piano. It's just who they are. You can take all
the Photoshop classes in the world but that just teaches you the
mechanics, not the aesthetics. Try art classes, especially art
appreciation and graphic design classes. You may still never be an
artist, but with a decent understanding of art you can usually fake it
pretty well.
Second, if you want to approach quality design then you need to
understand what quality design is and why it happens. Take a look at
the pages you want to be like, look at the code for sure, but more
importantly look at the actual design. How does the information flow?
How do the colors and layout affect your experience? Anyone can learn
the color picker in Photoshop, and even understand the Pantone color
matching system. But do you know why you want to use blues instead of
reds? Do you understand your color wheel? Do you understand the
visual cues experienced by a user when your graphic image has a
three-dimensional raised look? Do you understand cultural differences
in design and artwork that a viewer experiences based upon their own
value and societal influences? Do you understand what I just said?
Now that you have analyzed your favorite web sites, do the same with
all media. Analyze print media, not just ads but entire magazine
layouts, or newspaper spreads. Move on to industrial design. Look at
kitchen appliances and understand why one toaster works and another
doesn't, beyond the actual function and into the form. When you're
done analyzing design in man-made objects, move to nature. It's not
random, there's a specific design to the universe. Call it Zen, call
it the work of God or call it forces of nature, there's a reason that
tree branched where it did and why it leans to the side.
Now, translate all this into your web page. After a while, maybe a
few hours maybe many years, it will become a part of you. Natural
flow. You've now moved beyond the technical and into the artistic end
of web design. The look and feel. Now you need to make the two meet
in the middle, while getting your vision to reproduce correctly on
everyone else's browser.
Design isn't knowing the mechanics. Sometimes it's just a feeling. I
can't play the piano beyond Mary Had A Little Lamb, but I can enjoy a
classical music CD or a rock piano rift. I'll never be able to
actually create good music (beyond what my computer can do...) but I
understand what makes music good. For some people, the same is true
of web design. If it weren't, we wouldn't have so much clip art...
Jeff Cochran
--------------
>First, you need to face the possibility that you will never be
>satisfied with your attempts at web design. Many people can't draw,
>or ski or play the piano. It's just who they are. You can take all
>the Photoshop classes in the world but that just teaches you the
>mechanics, not the aesthetics.
This is definitely the point I'd look at first. Once you have all the
technical skills down and therefore know *how* to produce the site
that you can see in your 'mind's eye' the area that has to be
addressed is what do you want the site to look like.
At this stage, though the technical skills underpin the process,
creation of the site becomes more of an artform and less of a scienc.
The only scientific area which still impinges on the aesthetic now is
the ergonomics/psychology aspect. A little study in this area may help
but again, once you reach a certain stage it's all up to your
imagination and whether you can convince it to come up with the site
you want at the end.
This probably doesn't help all that much, but I hop it does and wish
you all the best !
Justin Key
--------------
> Now, translate all this into your web page. After a while, maybe a
> few hours maybe many years, it will become a part of you. Natural
> flow. You've now moved beyond the technical and into the artistic end
> of web design. The look and feel. Now you need to make the two meet
> in the middle, while getting your vision to reproduce correctly on
> everyone else's browser.
>
Good advice, one of the reasons I love producing web sites is that they
demand a variety of skills, artistic & graphic design, programming, user
interface design, databases, copywriting etc.
It's also one of the reasons that I get annoyed by programes that claim to
enable anyone to produce a professional web site. You wouldn't expect to be
able to produce Time Magazine using MS Publisher, so why do people think
that a copy of Frontpage will turn them instantly into professional web
designers?
Ranting a bit I know, but I spent years of blood sweat & tears to get to the
point I am at now, and the more I learn the more I realise I have left to
learn.
Wayne Putterill
--------------
>Good advice, one of the reasons I love producing web sites is that they
>demand a variety of skills, artistic & graphic design, programming, user
>interface design, databases, copywriting etc.
>
>It's also one of the reasons that I get annoyed by programes that claim to
>enable anyone to produce a professional web site. You wouldn't expect to be
>able to produce Time Magazine using MS Publisher, so why do people think
>that a copy of Frontpage will turn them instantly into professional web
>designers?
Yes, and that is why so many people hate FP, but in the hands of a good
designer, you can do great things with FP. A good designer can use MS
Publisher to layout something great too. It goes both ways. The biggest
arguments I've ever got into is from people that are very good at html and
get on me for using FP 98 and Dreamweaver. They say you can't create good
web pages with FP 98 and it is only for losers. But most of the sites I've
seen from these guys that brag about their html skills look very bad with no
sense of design. Good web pages is far more then just good html. I use FP 98
and Dreamweaver and have no problems because I know what they are both
capable of. I use the strength of both. Most clients don't care what you
use, they just want great looking web sites. I just got hired by a major
advertising graphics company because they liked the quality of sites I've
done. They like the fact that I can create sites from scratch including all
graphic design. They can care less what program I used, as long as the sites
work well.
Graphic design is the biggest thing. There are many programs that are very
capable today, FP 2000, Dreamweaver 2, Drumbeat 2000, Adobe GoLive, those
will create anything you want in terms of code, but nothing will replace a
creative graphic designer. That's why so many of these programs are targeted
to graphic designers. That is why they are designed to be so easy. That is
why many of them are now using Quark like interfaces and DTP terminology. As
a designer, my focus is the design and functionality. If the program I'm
using (Dreamweaver) does not create the desired JavaScript for example, we
will contract out the JavaScript programming. We don't need a full time
JavaScript or html expert. There are rare people that can do all that
technical stuff and are very good at design but that is very rare and I'm
not one of them. I would say to focus on your strengths. If you are not good
at graphic design, take some art classes and work on it, or if you are great
at html and JavaScript, go in that direction and be a programmer or learn
web server technology and focus on the back end of things.
Ric Grosh
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
http://130.236.236.234/kai/
"Written by Nevyn for SDC Syndicate 1999. This page is, as always,
best viewed in a high resolution. I think it should be a federal
crime to view a webpage with a resolotion bleow 1280*1024! "
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
F Langia <.> wrote:
>
>Thank you very, very much. This thing have puzzled me for quite a
>while. This mean that one must build www pages "for windows" because
>otherwise when the pages is viewed on a win browser the bigger font
>size will "prolong" tables and such and (sometimes) ruin the look.
Only if your "design" is tightly constrained.
In general, if the user's fonts are set to what is comfortable for that user,
and the browser window size is set accordingly, you will tend to get about the
same number of characters across a page, no matter what the official "font
size" is.
[Generally, as a user sets smaller font sizes, the user also makes individual
windows smaller, and vice-versa: for instance when I switched from a 15"
monitor with "large fonts" to a 17" monitor with "small fonts", I started
using smaller windows for most pplications].
Stanley Friesen
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Marcus Williamson wrote:
>
> Have just found the following "not found" errors on my web server logs
> for a file called favicon.ico. It seems that IE5 looks for this file
> by default on _every_ web site that it opens (or perhaps every site
> that it bookmarks?)
>
> The cause of this error is described here :
>
> http://microsoft.com/sitebuilder/magazine/cheatsheet.asp
>
> The obvious result of this is unnecessary internet traffic and 404
> errors in webmasters' error logs.
I do suggest that everyone take a look at the page referenced
above. In additon to this "feechur" (MS does *not* regard this
as a bug, but as an "opportunity" for webmasters), there are some
other exceedingly obnoxious behaviors documented here in "how to"
form. Examples: how to bookmark your page in the user's browser.
How to reset the user's home page to your page.
As far as I'm concerned, this *one* *page* describes enough
reasons not to use IE as my primary browser.
(Not to mention the new ActiveX security hole already found in
IE5, with the pointer listed here today. The hole is in an
ActiveX control written, distributed, and signed by Microsoft.
Microsoft places responsibility for blocking the effects of
the bug on the user configuring their security *and* knowing
how to revoke a valid ActiveX signature *and* knowing which
signature needs to be blocked. Truly scary
possibilities here....)
Diane Wilson
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
wrote:
> I'm looking for any documents that discuss the advantages of Web based
> applications compared to client/server?
Here it is in a nutshell: The browser programmers have already done all the
hard user interface and networking development for you, the part that
normally takes man-years. You just have to tinker around with
very-high-level stuff, the part that takes man-hours.
The disadvantages are (sometimes) less speed, and less flexibility of
presentation and interaction. With Java these concerns are mitigated to some
degree.
Miguel Cruz
-----
Forgot one: With a web interface, you don't have to care what operating
system and hardware is being used on your clients. Develop once, usable
anywhere (at least if you're a purist).
Miguel Cruz
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Gerke Preussner wrote:
> in my opinion tables are the most powerfull elements of HTML.
> you only have to learn how to use them.
In my real world experience, tables are the most misused elements of
HTML (with images in certain circumstances being a close second), and
I rarely if ever see someone use tables for their truly intended
purpose.
Shawn K. Quinn
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
William G. Schlake wrote:
> Miguel Cruz wrote:
> > ... The past three days (until yesterday) where this
> > newsgroup was actually full of substantive, on-topic discussion. I can't
> > figure out what was different exactly, but something... hmmm.
>
> Substantive, on-topic "discussion" in CIWAH?
> Oh... I forgot it's April Fool's day.
Through some bizarre coincidence, you missed it! Freaky! In your case, I
think it may be similar to trying to verify whether the light really goes
off when you close the refrigerator door.
Miguel Cruz
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Kevin wrote:
> as for Lynx, come on! How many people still use that text-based browser,
> and if so, what is wrong with them? Using it to browse the web is
> nonsensical (there are exceptions, I know). I picture hardcore UNIX
> hackers sticking to it like a security blanket, but in the real world,
> Lynx is dead.
I just attended a briefing for Federal web developers this week. We were
told about new laws concerning accessibility of electronic resources. One of
the stern recommendations was to run every page through Lynx, to help ensure
their accessbility for speaking browsers and various low-vision tools. This
means thousands of Federal employees (and by the typical cascading effect,
tens of thousands of contractors and other vendor staff) will be flipping
over each other to learn the world's fastest web browser.
Sorry to break it to you.
Miguel Cruz
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
This is the address of an excellent resource for checking internet rumors
and virus alerts.
http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/blhoax.htm
Kyla
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Found a great site that operates like a web browser only better. It is more
fun. I entered a search for cats and got some great links!! Found a fun page
where you could not only get wav sounds of animals but find out what they
are called in different languages. Like cat in spanish is Gato or in french
is Chat. It was so neat! go to http://www.ask.com and have fun.
Heidi
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
"Considering the "" tag to be an HTML tag is about as absurd as
considering a parachute to be an airplane."
Abigail
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
jerrad pierce wrote in message <3704811F.A18A8DF@networkengines.com>...
>Is there an easy way to test if a browser supports style sheets?
Check out this URI. http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/ I don't know if it is
easy - I haven't done it, but it can do what you want.
Ronny Adsetts
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
http://www.webstandards.org/ie5.txt
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Alan J. Flavell wrote:
>Kurt J. Lanza wrote:
>> You are probably out of luck. The whole concept of the Bookmark and
>> bookmark file is a browser-only issue. HMTL has no way to specify
>> anything like a bookmark.
>
>Indeed. But I'm sure you'll be pleased to learn that MSIE5, in addition
>to its improved conformance to published specifications, brings some
>exciting extensions for web page authors to set the reader's bookmarks,
>or even their home page, for them. And lots of other excitements.
>Take a look at e.g the items in
>http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/essentials/versions/ie5res.asp
>
>*shudder*
If it had not been for that last *shudder* I was close to read your post
in the "oposite way".
Fact is that IE5 is a plain disaster in almost every aspect that could
be thought of. And as a final "foot shot" CW and his gang has made a
dacapo of the IE3 collapse, by implementing parts of an XSL proposal
that is still under discussion and far from being ready for the status
of a recommendation.
So all you XML/XSL'ers start to learn now, how to circumvent IE5 XSL
bugs in all your future creations, in exactly the same way as we CSS'ers
have been fighting IE3 for a couple of years already.
Jan Roland Eriksson
-------
John Forrest Tomlinson wrote:
> Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> >Take a look at e.g the items in
> >http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/essentials/versions/ie5res.asp
> >
> >*shudder*
>
> I was initially very disturbed by this, but then realized that it
> doesn't force changes on the visitor -- rather it forces a question on
> them about if you want to "add to favorites" or make a page your home
> page. As such, if you want to use it an be pushy, fine. The visitor
> can decline.
For some reason, they forgot to document the _really_ useful one:
! While you're at it, you can also add a button or link in your
! page that prompts your users to permanently disable Javascript
! and restore their sanity. If they confirm, Javascript will be
! disabled, and no more daft questions, pop-up adverts or
! scrolling status-bar messages will appear. You can copy and
! paste the code below right into your page to try this out.
!
Paul Clark
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Alan J. Flavell-sig:
--
"The point of view of the early calligrapher was most direct: in the
first place his Manuscript was to be read [...]. The later men
probably thought more consciously of "beautifying" (which is the
beginning of danger), and in the last stage "Illuminators" resorted
to every kind of artifice." Edward Johnston (Sept. 1909).
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Alan J. Flavell sig:
--
'You cannot put "The Internet" into the Recycle Bin.'
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Joe Barta wrote:
> It's clear that 6 different people would like the web to have 6
> different purposes and head in 6 different directions. If we assume
> that 1)money and 2)silly human whims are the true pilots, then it is
> safe to assume that regardless of what the web was "designed" to be,
> the fact remains it is becoming (has become?) a visual medium.
To my mind, the most unexpected (and therefore remarkable in a positive
sense) part of the WWW has been the search engines.
The rest is interesting, for sure, and can be good fun, but basically
follows on from what went before (Xerox PARC and all that - there was a
TV segment about its early days, shown on the Open University relatively
recently).
But I never would have expected that the entire world-wide web, with
what? now surely hundreds of millions of URLs, would be full text
indexed and retrievable at a moment's notice. As I've remarked before:
to take just one example, I can type-in a few words from one of my own
web pages, and within moments see the page, its official mirror, and
three plagiarised versions. Truly remarkable. "Visual medium"? -
hardly.
Alan J. Flavell
--
'You cannot put "The Internet" into the Recycle Bin.'
-----
In <7edsmh$i9v$1@plonk.apk.net>, jbarta@apk.net (Joe Barta) wrote:
| "Alan J. Flavell" wrote:
| >On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Joe Barta wrote:
| >> It's clear that 6 different people would like the web to have 6
| >> different purposes and head in 6 different directions. If we
| >> assume that 1)money and 2)silly human whims are the true pilots,
Pilots they're not. Mostly, they follow the path of least resistance,
and mostly, the results are entropic.
| >> then it is safe to assume that regardless of what the web was
| >> "designed" to be, the fact remains it is becoming (has become?)
| >> a visual medium.
For all that "money" and/or "silly human whims" might care, perhaps.
It doesn't follow that this is "progress", nor does it follow that
these are what drive "innovation".
There's still a massive cloud of hype obscuring one basic, human,
historical fact about technology: the mass market, by definition, is
*never* on the cutting edge. Innovation has to be winnowed, watered
and dumbed down to idiot-proof nostrums before "silly human whims" get
to see it - and if they like it, at the point when everybody starts
raving "wow! this is so coool! this is so neeew!" and so on, "money"
knows what to do...
But by that time, the technologically significant events will have
already happened. Which means that whether the WWW is or isn't or may
be a "visual medium" is quite beside the point. The technological
facts make the WWW a *browsing* medium. See, e.g., an essay by one of
the vanishingly few journalists to actually have a clue:
| > To my mind, the most unexpected (and therefore remarkable in a
| > positive sense) part of the WWW has been the search engines. [...]
| > I never would have expected that the entire world-wide web, with
| > what? now surely hundreds of millions of URLs, would be full text
| > indexed and retrievable at a moment's notice.
I'm not surprised at all. In fact, searchability seems to have been a
"driving force" from the beginning, and the whole process didn't have
to start ab ovo. There were online databases in the form of e.g. WAIS
indexes, and (essentially) indexers like archie for FTP and veronica
or jughead for gopher, to name just a few. The WWW taking off on its
own, rather than simply adding to existing databases, was a natural
development out of the hyperlink mechanism, I would think.
That said, what has been *lost* is the high semantic-content feature
of indexes like WAIS. There's nothing more than something as primitive
as jughead could extract from a full text index of stuff encased in
TABLE and CENTER and FONT. It so happens that high-end indexing and
search packages, such as Verity, have supported SGML-based "zoned"
searching for years ('find all occurrences in
or '), but
turning such technology loose on the WWW is still demonstrably a
complete waste of time. Welcome to the mass market trailing edge.
| You're focusing on one aspect of the WWW and parlaying that to into
| a hopeful description of the whole thing in general.
Doesn't look that way to me: focus, yes (do you focus on things you
*don't* find remarkable?) but parlay, no.
| Pretty loose if you ask me.
Sounds like you're taking exception to an implied "there's nothing
(else) new here." Tough to feel good about being on the trailing edge,
right?;)
| Besides, a text index of the WWW isn't all that surprising or
| remarkable. Find a way to index all the NON-text material out there...
| then you'll have something.
There's plenty of research already going on. But what makes you think
"silly human whims" and "money" are ready for it?
Arjun Ray
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Some spammer wrote:
> Cheap, fast web hosting available at http://www.bexleynet.co.uk
Old internet saying.
Fast, Cheap, Good. Pick Two.
Paul Gregg
--------
It is interesting that you bring this up. I was reading a project
management book a while back, and it states something very similar that
I have found to be an invaluable piece of information.
When developing the plan for a project, only two of the following can be
fixed, the other must vary. Quality, Timeline, and Cost. You know you
will run into problems when your client tries to fix all three elements.
My advice, don't take the job or get practicing your miracle muscles ;)
In addition, the book I read suggested a fourth element, Scope. This
created the condition that only three elements can be fixed, the fourth
must vary.
Just spewing information.
CajunDave
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Hello to all
I have been reading these articles about web
page design with great interest.
Why with great interest well I have made
My sites Totally Accessible to all
Not like the great many sites out there
who not even take the trouble to try to do this in any way.
I have found many sites that people like my self
just cannot enter.
That people who are Deafblind, Blind net users
Even the ALT Tags on images are not on there sites.
and you cannot find your way around them.
Making a Site Accessible doesn't seem to be in the mind
of many webmasters and Designers on the net.
As long as they look good to the sighted hearing net user
then it OK.
But remember the net is not all just for the sighted hearing
world,
We all enjoy the net with it's vast information out there,
but remember to try and KEEP it accessible to all
so we all can learn new things and learn about each other.
We are all in this and should be aware of what
we should do and should not do when it comes to Web page design.
If you would like to go to
a sites which is accessible but not the best or most
interesting one for the sighted hearing readers of this group.
then try a site which I made myself
I do hope that you will find them of some use
to you when you think about updating you site.
and may try to make them accessible to ALL.
I hope that you did not find this e-mail letter to
boring.
Just my little thought about this subject.
all the very best to all on the group
Yours
--
The Brailler
--------------------
Hello all again.
and hi Paul
Paul Clark wrote:
>Not at all, thank you for sticking your head above the parapet, so to
>speak. It's refreshing to hear from someone for whom this is a very
>real requirement rather than a theoretical ideal.
Sending letters to groups is not a thing I do very often.
>I think your perspective would be enormously useful on these groups.
>You mentioned lack of ALT attributes being a problem - that's the most
>obvious one, I guess. I wonder could you list the other main things
>that stop you using Web sites easily? There are plenty of documents
>that describe it in theory, but I'd be interested in a direct personal
>perspective.
Well if you are interested, here I go
A frame site is a right so and so to get around in.
I cannot understand why sighted hearing people like these.
But if a person really need to have a frame on there site
they can quite easy have a No-Frames alternative. and they can try
and make sure the No-Frames link is the first link in the frame with
the initial focus.
columns and some tables can be hard to read on web sites.
Try style sheets to position graphics and text instead. Use descriptive
text links that will make sense if read
out of context. Very often a Deafblind or blind computer user will simply
use a keystroke that moves the focus from link to link, especially
when the text is in columns or formatted in such a way that makes the
information confusing.
>I take it from your description of yourself that you are using a Braille
>reader - could you describe the technology involved here?
I am using a braille display called Powerbraille made by blazie
Engineering
in the USA. It a 40 cell display, A braille cell is 1 letter in your
printed world.
the Braille display is put under the keyboard, the keyboard
is just like your own but my keyboard has braille on it and not printed
letters like your own.
>Is it a
>specialised browser, or a 'screen reader' running off a generic one
>(e.g. Lynx).
I am using the same software that many of you are uusing
and to go on net I use MS explorer 4.1 but will be trying out 5 very
soon.
>Are there any particular problems that Braille output
>causes, or solves (compared to speech output, say)?.
I my self need to use a Braille display to access the net
and my computer
I not use speech software as it no use to me.
I am a deafblind person.
>Please excuse my
>ignorance...
I am happy to try and help you with your questions
that is how we all learn.
Remember there are many deafblind and blind people on the
net. And we are customers too,
so if we have no access to your web site then you are
losing future customers.
Here is a site that will help you a little
to make sites accessible.
Bobby Approved Site < http://www.cast.org/bobby/ >
this page will help you to make a better site
that will let all to have access to you web pages
and just not the sighted hearing world.
I do hope Paul and the other members of the group
did enjoy a little of this letter.
and I hope it will help you .
all the very best to all
yours
James
--
The Brailler
--------------------
The Brailler wrote:
: A frame site is a right so and so to get around in.
: I cannot understand why sighted hearing people like these.
Actually, it's primarily Web *authors* who like frames. Most Web *users*
either don't care one way or the other, or dislike frames (some of the
dislikes stem from technical limitations in the current frames model
rather than intrinsic problems with the concept of frames).
: Try style sheets to position graphics and text instead. Use descriptive
: text links that will make sense if read
: out of context. Very often a Deafblind or blind computer user will simply
: use a keystroke that moves the focus from link to link, especially
: when the text is in columns or formatted in such a way that makes the
: information confusing.
The point about text links making sense out of context is an important one
for sighted users as well. All the available research seems to indicate
that sighted users generally skim text rather than reading it thoroughly,
and links stand out to them when they first skim a page. Link texts lose
much of their impact if they're redundant or context-dependent (I remember
seeing an (English-language) page written by a German author suggesting
proper diction for link texts. There were some interesting items on her
"words to avoid" list. One of those words was "available"; her argument
was that since nobody links to resources that *aren't* available, all the
word could do in a link text is take up space).
: I am using a braille display called Powerbraille made by blazie
: Engineering
Did Blazie acquire the Powerbraille from another company? I vaguely
remember it being from some other vendor (Telesensory?). Or are they
simply a dealer for it?
Eric Bohlman
----------------
Telesensory recently sold its products for the blind to Blazie.
Telesensory kept (and is trying to focus on) its products for the partially
sighted.
Darin McGrew
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> catnip wrote:
> >
> > If purists are a gang, I'd like to know the colours so I can get a
> > nifty t-shirt made (and a matching pocket protector of course...)
>
> Neat idea... If somebody were to put out a "HTML Purist Gang" shirt,
> maybe I'd buy one. Any entrepreneurs out there interested in supplying
> this?
Interesting idea. A plain grey T-shirt with the text:
Purist
in black would do the trick ;-)
Tim Fountain
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
David Dineen wrote:
> Burk Price wrote::
> >CSS also breaks gracefully.
>
> Bullshit. If a user with a non CSS-compliant browser goes to your
> page, what will they see? Text stretched out from one side of the
> screen to the other (hard to read), default background colour
> (probably grey), default text colour (probably black), default font
> (probably Times New Roman). It will look like any average website,
> cicrc 1994.
And if the user doesn't like what this looks like, he's free to change
the default font, colors, and browser window width, or else download a
newer browser that does support stylesheets. These are options he
didn't have in 1994 (though I don't recall lots of grousing and griping
back then about how horribly unreadable the Web was; there seems to be
more griping about the Web going on in 1999, after 5 years of
"improvements"). But in the meantime, the content of the page is just
as readable and accessible as any Web site was in 1994.
Daniel R. Tobias
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Push Me, Pull You
http://www.around.com/push.html
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Boris Schaeling did thusly spew forth:
>Why do you think people don't upgrade?
as someone who has access to the logs of a web server that gets a moderate
amount of traffic in a day, it's easy for me to see that a fair chunk of
people don't upgrade.
by looking at the agent logs cross-indexed with the requesting IP's it
seems that a clear pattern emerges: someone buys service from an all-in-one
ISP (like AOL, or Erols, etc.). The ISP provides a customized browser -
either one theyve written (the AOL's of the world) or one that they've
modified to add their logo to (Erols, Bell Atlantic, etc.). The consumer
gets this browser as part of their 'start up kit' and installs it on their
computer. They then use this until: a) Windoze dies and they have to reload
thier system; b) their ISP tells them to upgrade (usually by either a
login popup or actually sending them the new software); c) they see some
cool new feature in a friend's browser that they MUST have. Usually, due
to how long a new browser takes to download (20-30MB at 28.8 - 56Kbps),
most people avoid this like the plague. Where you see the most up to date
users are in offices and people who have ISDN, ADSL, cable modems, etc. at
home. So, until everyone everywhere has high speed access, or until we
stop seeing code-bloat in browsers (yeah, thatll happen), we'll continue
to see people operating well behind the latest revision.
>I'd say it's only a minority that still uses NN2.
pretty safe bet: minority is anything less than 50% and greater than 50%
of current internet users have been using the internet for less time than
'NN -gt 2' or higher have been available.
Thomas H Jones II
----------------
Joy Hamilton wrote:
> [quoted out of order]
> I am amazed almost daily how little people actually know about the Internet
> and its potential. [...]
At work (tech support for an ISP), I become familiar with all the latest
goodies. Ignorance or unawareness is not the only reason for not
"upgrading". As you mentioned, there are other reasons.
> [...]
> I would say most people don't upgrade becuase of the amount of time it takes
> to download the program. And many people that I come into contact with are
> just happy to finally be up and running on the Internet. [...]
These would apply to me. For browsing, I use a 486DX33 with Win 3.1 and
Navigator 3, with Java & JS turned off. If something's working well
enough for me, I don't take the time to download extra stuff. I'm happy
to be on the Internet. Everything's working fine for me.
There's one other reason you didn't mention: cost. Sure, I could get MSIE
5.0 for free, but I'd have to get Win95/98, a bigger machine to run it, or
add more memory, and definitely get a bigger hard drive.
Apart from side-bar menus through frames, most of the goodies I've seen
don't really add that much to my browsing experience. I'm certainly not
going to spend another $2500 to view stuff like MouseOver changes in
colour, etc.
I'm not saying that the new technologies are bad, just that I'm not
interested in viewing them. If your restaurant has walk-in and
drive-through, fine. If it's drive-through only, well, I'm not buying a
car just to eat there.
As for style sheets, this could be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I'll probably upgrade eventually just for that. It's too bad they weren't
implemented back in the Browser 2.x days.
> I wish they would all catch up!
In the meantime, just indulge me for a year or so until I've had a chance
to save up some money for the upgrade!
Willondon Donovan
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Pai Yili wrote:
>However, this will not get the graphic to look like the work of a
>professional.
> You really need to make the graphic with the right tool. Xara
>Webster, Xara 3D, Ulead Cool 3D, the list goes on and on. If you plan to
>make professional websites, get tools that produce better results.
One would think that what he needs is professional experiance/education,
rather than a tool. Our graphics person can do wonderful things with MS
Paint.
REBUS
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
"Jan Smith" writes:
> Does using javascript in an HREF actually cause a problem? Under what
> circumstances?
[ cases reduced a little for brevity ]
(1)
This creates a link with undefined behaviour - such as doing nothing at all.
Not a nice thing to inflict on your readers. Harmful.
(2)
For browsers where (1) is meaningful, this is exactly equivalent to it.
For other browsers it will still do something reasonable. Therefore (2)
is always preferable to (1).
(3)
Preferable to (1) in cases where the "some-normal-url" in (2) wouldn't
make sense: non-Javascript readers won't be confused, but you still
may have a problem with some JS-enabled browsers. Best for nice toys
like a webpage calculator or spreadsheet.
> Or is this more of a protest about mangling the original intent of HREF?
HREF defines an anchor to another resource: a javascript resource in
principle falls within that, so I really don't see it as "mangling the
intent of HREF". The difficulty is that on the WWW, (1) causes grief
to WWW users, and can be trivially fixed using (2), (3), or variants.
--
Nick Kew
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
<...>
And remember, the Internet would probably not have taken off as
quickly if it were sold to the people as the Marketing Superhighway.
Lord knows we get enough marketing thrown at us already.
--
Shawn K. Quinn
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
New "feature" in Internet Explorer 5.0: IE5 assumes that short "404"
documents are all the less-than-helpful default error messages, and provides
its own hints on how to avoid getting a "404 Not Found" condition.
If you have a custom ErrorDocument for "404 Not Found" and the document
is less than 512 bytes long, then Internet Explorer won't display it.
(This has been verified with IE5 for Win98 and IE5 for Solaris-2.x.)
You will need to add more text to the custom 404 document to make it
show up. Text such as
We're sorry that you could not find the document you were
looking for. Please check out the top-level index
of this site for more information.
and enough other filler to get past the magic 512-byte limit.
Joe Smith
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
William G. Schlake wrote:
> Sorry Charlie... you couldn't be further off the mark. The point
> purists consistently miss because they like to keep their heads buried
> firmly in the sand is the average web author simply isn't obsessed
> over specs, portability or so-called degrade gracefully double talk.
Who wants to be "the average web author"? The average web author can't HTML
their way out of a paper bag. Obsessing with getting the job done well is
what separates the pros from the rest.
Miguel Cruz
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Jacqui Caren wrote:
> IMHO we live to learn and
> Alan is an expert in this field.
It's a trick - just concentrate on answering the few topics where I know
what I'm talking about, and avoid saying too much about the many where I
don't ;-)
Alan J. Flavell
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
William G. Schlake wrote:
> What tags don't NS and MS understand?
>
> Here list them:
>
>
>
Last time I looked (i.e., not including IE5)
LINK, BDO, IFRAME, FIELDSET, LEGEND, LABEL, BUTTON, OPTGROUP, Q, TBODY,
THEAD, TFOOT, umpteen attributes, correct implementation of OBJECT.
If you widen the net to all the SGML stuff that should have come for
free from the beginning: Multi-comment comment blocks, internal
declaration subset entity definitions and references, notations, most
SHORTTAG features, CDATA and other marked sections, RE suppression,
correct implementation of OMITTAG minimisation, character entity refs...
And before you whinge that this is all incomprehensible ancient history,
most of these missing facilities solves a specific problem which bugs
web authors to this day - for example "how to I include one file in
another", "how do I stop < being treated as markup", "why do my table
cells have whitespace around them". What's more it's all been in there
since HTML Year Zero.
Paul Clark
-------------
>
>What tags don't NS and MS understand?
>
>Here list them:
OBJECT - not there or broken
Q - not there at all
DIV - not there or broken (in conjunctions with style sheets)
TABLE - different types of support
LINK - not there or broken
STYLEs - very much broken in some versions
SCRIPT - different implementations
EMBED/APPLET - different implementations (Ever see how much work is
involved in getting the Java Plug In to work with both IE and NS?)
And this is only off the top of my head. I'm sure that others can
provide more or pointers to the inconsistances for the *basic* HTML.
Michael K. Neylon
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
William G. Schlake wrote:
: Every year major corporations spend millions of dollars developing
: some truly creative commercials and pay a hefty fee to have them run
: during the super bowl. They could save a bundle if they just had their
: message scroll up the screen. Wow, I wonder why they don't.
Because EtOH inhibits ADH, that's why.
Those Super Bowl TV commercials, to do their job, need to grab the
intention of someone whose brain is devoting most of its energy to
processing rather urgent signals coming from his bladder, and who has
gotten up from his seat and is heading to the bathroom to deal with those
signals. Under those circumstances, it takes a real sensory blitz to get
his attention.
But nobody views a Web site under those circumstances. The very fact
that someone is viewing a Web site means that the site already *has* the
viewer's attention. It doesn't *need* to shout "Hey! Look at Me!"
(HLAM) at the viewer, and doing so is more likely to interfere with the
viewer's enjoyment of the site than enhance it.
No, the Web is not at all like TV. TV programs and commercials *have* to
be extremely banal and put style over substance because they're intended
to be viewed by people whose attention is elsewhere. The main reason the
typical American spends far more time watching TV than reading books is
*not* that he prefers pictures to words. It's that he can watch TV while
doing other things, but reading demands his full attention. Web
"surfing," unlike TV watching, is a "full-attention" activity. And yes,
some people do indeed seek an "experience" when they go to a Web site,
but it's almost always an "active viewing" experience, where the viewer
wants an experience controlled by him, not a "passive viewing" experience
like TV that's controlled by someone else.
An effective TV commercial delivers a message to an unengaged mind. An
effective Web marketing effort delivers a message to an engaged mind.
The techniques involved don't overlap much, if at all. "Catch them while
they're getting up to piss" simply doesn't work on the Web.
Eric Bohlman
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Steve Pugh wrote:
> John Forrest Tomlinson wrote:
> >I'd like visitors to my site to see a tiled background image if
> >possible, but want to specify a background color in case they are
> >using a text-only browser or have image-loading turned off. Can I use
> >both background and bgcolor in the body tag? Is there any problem with
> >this?
>
> Yes you can have both attributes, in fact you should have both (with
> the bgcolor set to the predominate colour of your background image)
> for those cases where image loading is switched off or the background
> image fails to load for some reason.
AAPOI, the machine I've got downstairs will anti-alias *all* text to
the colour the bgcolor is set to, ignoring the background image. If an
author uses a predominately red backgroud image (sic), doesn't declare
a bgcolor, and your default is grey; you'll get "halo effects" around
all letters which really does look awful.
Tim Fountain
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Alan J. Flavell sigs:
--
"Dickens was abusing cinematic techniques before
the medium had been invented" - BBC2 arts prog.
--
( ) Yes, I want to restart my computer now.
(o) No, I would prefer a decent operating system.
--
############################
### VORSICHT! ###
### freilaufende Trolls ###
### Bitte nicht füttern! ###
############################
--
Netscape Composter
--
"...in order to have the least helplessly submissive experience"
- Todd Fahrner
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"I'm a perfectionist because I'm fussy in what I do. You're a nitpicker
because you live to find fault."
William G. Schlake
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William G. Schlake (comments@hobsonsquare.com) wrote:
: On Tue, 20 Apr 1999 22:39:32 GMT, "Dan McGarry"
: wrote:
: >2) What is this so-called purist credo? I've seen many attempts to
: >characterize it in one way or another, but I haven't seen a single
: >definition that reached any reasonable level of consensus. That fact should
: >give us pause for thought.
: It isn't difficult at all and it should give one pause for thought
: indeed.
: A purist is a born nitpicker.
: A purist obsesses over trivial issues at nauseum.
: A purist is more concerned about other people's pages then his own and
: will loudly quack, yell and bellyache every time he stumbles unto a
: site that doesn't meet with his approval.
: A purist MUST find fault and will go out of his way looking for it.
:
: A purist MUST try to correct not only what other people do on THEIR
: web sites but is prone to also "correct" what other people post to
: newsgroups being unwilling for anyone to freely express an opinion
: contrary to his own without needing to attack it. Hell, purists are so
: snooty it is common for one purist to need to "correct" fellow
: purists!
: A purist naturally thinks he is superior to everyone else not just on
: HTML matters...EVERYTHING!
: A purist can't admit he's wrong. Never!
: Need I continue? I think not. Everyone of the people that just must
: "argue" with me on a regular basis exhibit most and some ALL of the
: traits I ticked off.
: Rather sickening isn't it.
I am a purist; but I am not as described by Schlake above.
Since there is some doubt about what a purist is I shall
elaborate what I think a purist is and why I should feel
honoured to be referred to as a purist.
I came to writing HTML after some decades of programming.
The _first_ thing programmers learn is that a program that
is not syntactically correct will not give any results at
all. The second thing they learn is that without computer
assistance it is almost impossible to write a syntactically
correct program, and that getting the syntax right is a
pre-requisite to getting anything else done. So writing a
computer program is an interative process of getting rid of
syntactic errors. Compared with writing a computer program
of a thousand lines, embedding HTML into a document is
relatively trivial, but programmers know that even such
trivial tasks cannot be completed by most people without
error, consequently expect to get things wrong, and
prefer to use computer assistance to make corrections. So
naturally when I started to write HTML I looked for the
computer assistance to remove both the careless errors, and
the errors I had made due to misunderstanding aspects of the
language. So, my background made me want to _validate_
formally, the HTML I had written, and I was surprised that
browsers didn't come with an integral syntax checker that
produced line by line error messages like a compiler.
As a programmer I am interested in portability. I
want a program that I have written in FORTRAN or C or Pascal
or PERL or C++ to work on any platform that supports these
languages. Recently I had to revive some programs I had
written in 1987 to modify them and re-use them. I was very
glad that they were written in ANSI/ISO Pascal, and compiled and
ran on different hardware, under a different operating
system, and 12 years on from when they were written. This
could only happen because I used software that satisfied an
internationally agreed standard. My experience as a
programmer has taught me:
i) The need to validate even simple code
ii) The value of standardisation of computer software.
So that's where I come from. I want to write code that is
correct, and I want to write code that is guaranteed to work
in any software environment that purports to support it. Then
I can be sure that the code that I write will do what I
intended it to do when I wrote it.
Notice that I haven't written a word about content, but only
about the environment in which I am predisposed by my
experience to expect to operate. That's why I support
standards, and why I would prefer other people to support
them as well, because then I can be sure that my software
will compile and run their programs, my standard browser can
read their standard documents _every_ time.
The next question to be addressed is _What can the web
offer that other media cannot?_ There is no point in
publishing something on the web that is better published
as a book. For me, the principal innovation is hypertext.
So, we have a medium that offers a new way of linking
documents. This alone is a wonderful boon, offering the
opportunity to mechanise the making of concordances in
literature. This is a tool of great power in scholarship
offering a textual microscope that allows texts to be
compared quickly and in great detail, and it's so easy to
do. I set up a webpage for my own interest that has
automated querystrings and drives a little cgi-bin script to
return indices to related documents. This is a feasibility
study, not an all-singing all-dancing commercial website,
but it is an example of what the web is _uniquely_ capable
of offering.
The web also has the potentiality to become the greatest
public library in the world, where information is freely
disseminated to an immense audience.
But then, people realise that they can make money, and the
innocent dreams of altruism and scholarship fade and are
replaced by blatant, greedy hucksterism, the commercial
attack on standards to tie users into using proprietary
software, the provision of non-standard baubles to infatuate
the superficial, the flashy, the ignorant.
As a public-spirited person I regret this, so I am a purist
in terms of what the web is used for. I have tried to
explain to those mad-with-greed supporters of the big two
generators of ipso facto non-standard standards, but their
values and mine are incommensurate. I regret that they are
winning. I don't feel superior to Schlake, but I do know
that we have nothing in common because I don't spend hour
after hour typing bile, and would certainly avoid his
company if I were ever in the position to meet him
face-to-face. I'm sorry for him because despite the
patience of the other posters he cannot understand that
those who feel that the commercial processes that he
supports so vigorously are undermining the concept of the
greatest _public_ library in the world. On second thoughts,
perhaps he can understand it but doesn't care...somebody put
the torch to the library of Alexandria.
In one respect I am not a purist. Every computer
language, even seriously bondage-and-discipline languages
like Pascal, have unforeseen, deprecated usages that allow
the rebellious programmer to circumvent the plans of the
language designer and make the computer do what s/he wants
it to do. So I have no qualms about using tables for layout,
for making typographic images, and using them for initial
letters, or doing any damn thing I please, provided only
that the documents validate.
This is a long posting, one that has been waiting to be
written for a long time.
I know that other people have different views about
what it takes to be a purist. These are mine, and putting
my money where my mouth is, here is my purist website:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/connexion/
John O.
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mlau@iohk.com (Just Another Miserable Soul) wrote:
>I have posted this question for twice before, and I don't think I have
>made myself clear with the question. I wanted to have a very large
>background and not have it re-tile, for example, I would like to do
>something like this site does : http://www.olivemedia.com/index1.html
They created a really large image (Photoshop indicates the image occupies
slightly more than 2 meg, once the jpeg is expanded in memory) such that you
don't see it tiling. If you had a display with enough resolution, you would
be able to open your browser enough to the point where the image would tile.
In my opinion, this is a bad thing. They succeeded in having their
background appear to be static, but at what cost? Try looking at their page
on a slower machine without much memory, and you will notice a real
performance problem. Scrolling on their page is noticeable on my machine,
when I compare it to other pages that do not contain such large graphics.
I use style sheets on my page (http://www.mmwalks.com/) to get a similar
effect *if the browser supports style sheets*.
There's a catch. When I view my page in Netscape 3, I see no background.
Netscape 4 does not have enough CSS support to keep the background image
stationary while scrolling. The effect appears best in IE4. (I prefer
Netscape 3 for my own personal use. That's what I use for most browsing.)
But...I don't *need* a background image. I'm perfectly happy with having
different browsers render my site in different ways. I find this better
than forcing an unnecessarily large picture down somebody's virtual throat.
:)
mmwalks@yahoo.com
http://www.mmwalks.com/
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On Sat, 24 Apr 1999, Bill Baker wrote:
> Is CSS fairly compatible with older browsers?
Of course: it's 100% compatible with older browsers, they ignore it
entirely. It's the newer browsers which are the problem, because they
interpret it wrongly, in so many different ways.
> We are considering using
> some of the features but wish our pages to be accessible by most web
> users.
The word "but" puts the situation back to front. Migrating to CSS
is the way to re-claim _accessibility_. You may wish to retain some of
the deprecated HTML3.2 presentation-like markup for the time being
though, so that non-CSS browsers don't look as bad as they've been
designed to be.
Alan J. Flavell
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Mike Kern wrote:
> I am the manager of a web site for a television station, where
> we have a lot of viewer interaction via e-mail. What possibilities
> are there for databasing, or warehousing, all of the e-mails
> received for some type of data mining or leveraging of this
> information? Can any of you think of creative uses for this type
> of technology?
C'mon, Mike, you work for a TV station and you're not thinking 24-7
about marketing? ;) Okay, the rest of my message will be applicable
to any business, not just TV.
I'll start with a caveat: unless the people whose e-mail addresses
you have gave you those addresses fully aware that they were going
to be used for a marketing purpose, and *wanting* them to be used
for a marketing purpose, they are only useful for "internal use" -
figuring out aggregate stats about different things - if even for
that. If you use them in any "external" manner and people find
out, the absolute best you can hope for is alienation. Protests,
boycotts or lawsuits are not unlikely.
That said, leveraging e-mail is definitely a Good Thing. Just do it
in a manner that lets the users control whether they (even begin to)
get it, and benefits them. Set up a mailing list that people can
subscribe to[1] and unsubscribe from[2] at will. Tell them up front
what kind of information they'll get. Tell them that there'll be
small quantities of ads mixed in. Tell them how often it'll come
out. Wham-o, you've got a great marketing tool that requires almost
no work on your part to maintain.
[1] The process of subscribing should be relatively easy, but should,
no, *must* contain a confirmation step, so that people can't go around
subscribing other people for kicks.
[2] The process of unsubscribing should be at least as easy as the
process of subscribing.
Once you've got it up and running... gee, what kind of stuff would
people want to hear from your company? Information and times on
upcoming specials? Information on community events that you're
sponsoring, or where your personnel will be making public appearances?
Information on contests, charitable projects, etc? Do you have food
drives, or toy drives at the holidays? One more way to get the word out.
If you're in the media, leave a little space somewhere in the message
for an advertiser... maybe at the bottom it'll say "This week's
newsletter brought to you by Joe's Bar and Grill at 40th and Market -
stop by to try our new Barbecue Squidburger!" or whatever. (Of
course, Joe's would *pay* you for this... ;)
As long as people only get the mail if they've _asked_ for it, and
stop getting it when they don't want it any more, they will love you
to little bitty pieces, worship the ground you walk on, generally
think you're great, and complain if you don't send it out on time.
Dan (been there, done that, got 7500+ people who _ask_ for the ads) Birchall
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Mark Evans wrote:
>Is it really so difficult to write a CGI program
>which takes the form, makes some sense of it,
>sends an email, then sends a page back saying
>"Ok sent that stuff"?
Yes, it is relatively difficult. It would also be reinventing the
wheel, usually.
Normally it is sufficient to know how to _use_ a CGI script when one's
goal is something as common as that. Probably there's such a script
made available by one's ISP. If not, one could use a remotely hosted
service. And if one decides to use one's "own" script for the purpose,
it is usually best to _find_ a good script and install it, and perhaps
make some enhancements.
Not really HTML topic, but it seemed necessary to try to clear things
up. The usual advice "use CGI" does _not_ mean "write a CGI script",
any more than the advice "use a graphics program" means "write a
graphics program".
Jukka Korpela
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Stacey Capps wrote:
>Wow. You must have a REALLY slow machine. That background image is only
>19k, due to the fact that the site creators used extreme JPEG compression
>on it. The page, as a whole, is still well within conventional bandwidth
>limits for site designers. It is less than 30k all tallied together.
There are two issues: how big the file is and how big the image is. Two
two are not the same. The first is impacted by how well the image
compresses. 19k isn't bad. The bandwidth of the file travelling across the
wire is not a problem.
The second is more troublesome. According to Photoshop, an 860x860 24-bit
color image is 2.12M. 860 x 860 = 739,600 pixels x 3 bytes/pixel =
2,218,800 bytes / 1024^2 bytes/meg = 2.116M...or 2.12, as Photoshop
indicated.
This is the size of the image. Not how big the file needs to be to transfer
the picture, but how much memory the computer needs to decompress the image.
All they really needed was a ~400k image of the olive, and they could have
set the background color to the color they wanted.
I noticed this first with a site that was using a 3.5M image for a
background. Whenever I went to that site, my browser always slowed down
just a little. Not that much, but enough to be noticeable. When I closed
their site, everything was back to normal.
I created a 3200x3200 gif that was mainly just one color. 3200 x 3200 x 1
byte/pixel = 10 meg. The file itself was 8k. This really makes scrolling
in my browser noticeable. :) Try it...create a picture like this in
Photoshop and save it as a gif, and then try using it as a background.
mmwalks@yahoo.com
http://www.mmwalks.com/
--------
> The second is more troublesome. According to Photoshop, an 860x860 24-bit
> color image is 2.12M. 860 x 860 = 739,600 pixels x 3 bytes/pixel =
> 2,218,800 bytes / 1024^2 bytes/meg = 2.116M...or 2.12, as Photoshop
> indicated.
If you think that's bad, take a look at this 43 byte GIF (in hexadecimal
so it can be inspected in the clear):
47 49 46 38 39 61 FF FF FF FF F0 00 00 FF FF FF
00 00 00 21 F9 04 01 00 00 00 00 2C FF FF FF FF
01 00 01 00 00 02 02 24 0A 00 3B
Only a 43 byte download (plus HTTP headers), but most browsers require
nearly 12 Gigabytes to decompress it, yet it actually contains only one
transparent pixel. If transparency is not required it could be reduced by
another 8 bytes.
I call this file "nullzilla.gif". I don't know enough about the JPEG
standard yet to create an equivalent image.
greg@apple2.com
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
#include
#include
main()
{
int ch;
while ((ch = getchar()) != EOF)
{
switch(ch)
{
case '&': printf("&"); /* & */
break;
case '<': printf("<"); /* < */
break;
case '>': printf(">"); /* > */
break;
default: printf("%c", ch); /* other character */
}
}
}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Iain Hallam wrote:
>Is there a way to set the background colour of a textarea (or, for that
>matter, a text input)?
Not in HTML, but such things can be suggested in CSS. See
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/forms/present.html
for some notes on current browser support.
Jukka Korpela
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What's that site running?
http://www.netcraft.com/
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Malkag1 wrote:
>
> I am interested in passing my college course, so I need to know how to design a
> website.Interested in finding the info on the web.
Try:
http://www.w3.org/
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/www.html
http://www.htmlhelp.com/
http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/all.html
http://www.useit.com/
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
http://goodpractices.com/
http://css.nu/
http://validator.w3.org/
http://www.cast.org/bobby/
And if that's not enough:
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?text
Veronica Karlsson
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For a quick paste-and-validate, I recommend
http://www.htmlhelp.org/tools/validator/direct.html
Alan J. Flavell
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TeraRam wrote:
>
> I would like to know for what is XML, XLS, MathML, SVG, DOM?
> Where can I find something about them?
> & why do they exist, for what?
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a generic language for describing
structured data.
XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) is a style-sheet language written
in XML. 'XLS' is a typo!
MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) is a language for description of
mathematical formulae.
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a language for describing resolution
independent, vector-based graphics.
DOM (Document Object Model) defines the interface from a scripting
language (such as Javascript) to the objects described by an markup
language (HTML, or any XML-based format)
For all of these, I recommend going directly to the source:
http://www.w3.org
Paul Clark
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In article <7gfdag$5sd$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, mark7341@my-dejanews.com wrote:
>When printing a B/W line drawing image
>or a grayscale image on an inkjet printer, is
>there any way to get rid of "the jaggies"?
Nope, except that if your image is anti-aliased grayscale rather than B/W
bitmap, you can get "the blurries" instead. A 72-dpi image looks
acceptable onscreen, but will always print poorly. Accept the WWW as a
screen-based medium; that browsers print at all is merely incidental and
occasionally handy as a memento of a site visit. If your audience needs
hi-res line art to print, offer download links to appropriate file formats
(perhaps Postscript or EPS, but not GIF or JPEG).
--
---
Lanny Chambers
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Subject: Re: Help!!
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 18:15:49 -0400
From: Shane McWhorter
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
Greg Brack wrote:
> I hope that someone here can offer me some help, I bought a monitor off
> of my friend and I cannot get it to work at higher than 640x480
> resolution it is a Sony CPD-1320 if someone out there knows where I can
> get the driver for this I would appreciate it.
We did this for a project in a Cognitive Psychology
grad course I took years ago. From what I recall, it had
something to do with working memory and attention limitations.
Have you tried developing a user interaction model?
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
WYSIWMPUCBWPG --
"What you see is what most people using common browsers would
probably get."
WYSINWOGOTWWW (what you see is not what others get on the
World Wide Web)
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FM wrote:
> What sort of tools are available for site management? [...]
> Linux programs are most welcome, as that's the primary OS
> I'll be using, but I would appreciate other tools as well.
There are a number of HTML preprocessors written in Perl, including HTMLPP
. There are Linux binaries for
version 1.1 of James Clark's SP suite , but I'd
recommend building version 1.3 from source. SP includes nsgmls, the
validator I use; it also includes a number of other tools that you may find
useful.
Combine an HTML preprocessor and nsgmls with makefiles and custom Perl
scripts as needed, and you've got a pretty good system for site management.
--
Darin McGrew
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Disclaimer: TEDesign can not, and will not be held responsible for riots,
acts of god, civil wars, speeding tickets, criminal acts against family
members, random acts of violence, slaughtering of small defensless animals,
poor television reception, burning and/or razing of public libraries, skin
cancer, low academic achievment, or alien abduction.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
A Correspondent writes: "MS are getting worse and worse, and they don't seem
able to help themselves. Sooner or later, I'm convinced, people are going to
get sick of software that comes with a designer minefield as a non-optional
feature. Let's hope there are still some competitors left by then."
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
There is no way to flow text inside an area of an image[*] without
employing a Java applet which has its own page rendering engine (which is
a non-viable solution). Cutting up images with tables or using layers or
CSS positioning requires that you give up the flowing of text and make
(generally false) assumptions on font size and window width.
You'd have to encode the text into the image (supplying identical ALT
text), and even then you give up even more flexibility. It isn't fun
redoing images because of a change in enclosed text copy.
There is a thread about this in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets
where some type of bounds mask is suggested for addition to a possible
CSS3 standard which could be used to hint to browsers the internal shape
of an image and allow for text flow incursions into the image's bounding
rect (which essentially would no longer be a rectangle). Fallback to
older CSS implementations and CSS-unaware browsers would be to use the
image's rectangular bound.
[*] If you want to position text within an image using CSS positioning,
you still can only have the text in a rectangular box. You can't do it if
you want it to wrap to a curving margin. A text box positioned atop the
image still has rigidly vertical left-right bounds.
greg@apple2.com
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Tel wrote:
: And besides, I always thought websites are being developed with a
: specific target audience in mind... you certainly wouldn't want to
Yes, websites are generally developed with a specific target audience in
mind. The fallacy you're falling into, though, is the notion that that
target audience can be meaningfully defined in terms of browsing
situations or sensory capabilities.
Simple analogy: TV commercials are almost always developed and deployed
with a specific target audience in mind. But that target audience is
*never* defined by what brand of TV set the viewer is using, or what size
TV screen he has. Restaurants almost always target their menus and decor
toward specific groups of diners. But those groups are *never* defined by
the modes of transportation they take to get to the restaurant.
Statements like "We're targetting this beer ad toward viewers with 25-inch
Panasonic TV's" and "We're coming up with a menu for sport-utility vehicle
owners" would come off as loonier than Looney Tunes. Yet they're no
different, conceptually, than targetting a Web site based on the
technology used to view it rather than the interests of the viewers.
Eric Bohlman
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Great HF-lesson in the Washington Post yesterday:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-05/08/151l-050899-idx.html
Five male journalists who write about cars had
tested the *Acura Navigation System*. All of them,
she said, did the same thing. "What is is with you
guys?," she demanded. "Why do you have to
challenge it? Why do you ask it for instructions, and
then decide to go your own way? That is not the
way it's supposed to work. You are supposed to
follow the system. It is not supposed to follow you."
Jorn Barger
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Actually, as a designer, there's a lot to be said for using the
worst browser you can find, instead of the best. You'll have a
much better appreciation of the web experience that your clients
and readers will have.
Diane Wilson
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Steve Pugh wrote:
>catnip wrote:
>>Steve Pugh wrote:
>>>I've got five Netscapes, two Internet Explorers, Opera, Mosiac,
>>>HotJava, Ariadna, Oracle Power Browser, UdiWWW, Lynx, Act and the
>>>WebTV simulator on my PC.
>>
>> I'll see your browsers and raise you a
>>PalmTop.
>
>I'll see you're palmtop (people in this studio have been known to look
>at web sites on Psions and Nokias) and then I'll raise you two
>different speech browsers (sadly both trial copies expired and I
>haven't talked the bean counters into buying us a copy of one or the
>other yet).
Hang on a minute...I need to look through my purse to see if I can
keep up...
catnip
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
In <374857b8@cs.colorado.edu>, Tom Christiansen wrote:
| It's a sorry job being a Standards guy (a "Standardist") when most
| people don't realize that Standards even exist, or why.
It's a bit more complicated than that, I think.
There are many many more Sons of Mary than Sons of Martha.
| They just take whatever their crummy wysiwig fleeceware puts out
Because, for the most part, they are Sons of Mary. They anoint and
entitle themselves to believe that they are the worthy beneficiaries
of the "fact" that it shall be the job, the duty, the calling, the
obligation, yea verily the apodictic destiny of some Son of Martha to
have Gotten It Right - for the sake of these same Sons of Mary, of
course.
| It's tempting but ultimately unjust and ineffective to levy blame
| on the users.
There are two categories of users: users of fleeceware, and users of
crippleware. Fleeceware serves to feed crippleware. Once the process
is understood how users of crippleware came to their sorry situation,
it should come as no surprise that there are users of fleeceware. In
either case, however, a user absolved of responsibility is what being
a Son of Mary is all about.
| Instead, the conscientious Standards person should mount a multi-
| pronged attack against the root cause to fight the War Against
| Bastardization.
The root cause is ignorance of technology. This is easily exploited to
foster a cargo cult attitude towards products: it doesn't matter how
good or bad the engineering of these products are, as long as they're
*impressive*. After that initial intimidation, the subsequent entropic
waste is a simple matter of letting hype, hoopla and appeals to vanity
work their usual magic. Jump on that bandwagon and keep ahead of the
Joneses!
| The first step is to go for the distributors of these Bastardizations.
The distributors, or the disseminators? Consider the possibility that
the manifestly ignorant nevertheless deem themselves "informed". How
did *that* circumstance come about, and how does it perpetuate itself?
The "education" of the ignorant is also a business.
| You can't blame simple users for getting hooked, but you can blame
| the pushers, the Bastardizors.
It takes two to tango. Neither can you prevent the unscrupulous from
pandering to the ignorant, nor can you rescue technology from abuse.
| This is hard, because it often means dealing with people whose goals
| are diametrically opposed to interoperability and accessibility.
| They want to generate something that works only with their own stuff.
| They want to lock users into dependency on their drugs and destroy a
| free and open society. That's why MS-HTML exists, you'll recall.
And that's why and