11.15.2007

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Don says:

I'm wondering if I should write a book entitled "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Internet".   I've always treated my closest friends like extended family so I guess it was only natural to start feeling the same way about my friends on the web.   Maybe it's because I was an Army brat who moved around a lot and have always had friends, and family, whom I haven't seen in years.   I'm not sure how or why but my internet friends are as real to me as my friends in the every-day "real world" even though I've never met them in person and have only talked to a handful of them on the telephone.   Last year (2006) during the Christmas season we decided to telephone as many of our web friends as we could find phone numbers for.   For the most part these are web savvy people who know how to protect themselves on the web and there were only of few of them who we knew enough about to locate through online telephone directories so we didn't talk to very many folks but that was our Christmas present to ourselves and I expect we'll do it again this year.   If you happen to be a reader who often corresponds with us via email, that, gentle reader, is your cue to make sure we have your telephone number and some notion about the best dates and times of day to call you during the month of December.   Of course if you're just a visitor who thinks it'd be neat to receive Christmas greetings, via telephone, from us then it behooves you to contact us before Christmas and give us the aforementioned information.   That is the name of that tune.

Lisa says:

It's so exciting.   I'm a 'real' web designer, I got paid and everything!   Seriously, folks, this web-design thing has me in a dither.   In high school I took a Commercial Art course for two years and learned enough to know I didn't have the...what? Vision?   Talent?   Something, I didn't have it.   My work always looked amateurish to me.   I got good marks, was praised for what I did, but it wasn't really good according to my own standards.   Isn't that odd?   When I discovered PaintShop Pro I fell in love with Vector Drawing and proceeded to develop my own style because there was very little on the web that taught it.

I just read some very good advice from Tony Karp at "The Tao of Web Sites".

• Trust your own judgment.
• When you build your web site, don't spend a lot of time thinking about what would please the most visitors, or what you can do to attract visitors to your site.
• If you do, you'll end up with a site that looks like everyone else's. You'll have all the latest high-tech stuff, in an effort to make your site an "awesome experience."
• The artists who pursued their own unique visions ended up being shown in museums. The artists who tried to please the most people ended up being shown in motel rooms.
• Don't be misled into thinking that the best sites are built by those with the most technical prowess.
• Don't seek inspiration from the web.
• Follow your own star, set your own standards, be your own judge, and others will end up copying your pages.
• Don't worry about achieving perfection on the first try. The nice thing about the web (as opposed to other forms of publishing), is that you can go back and change things again and again.
• Experiment.
• Evolve.

Thank you once again, Tony.   That's just what I'll do.   The reason I'm listening to him is that he is the originator of the CSS Zen Garden, a now-famous site and example of a growing movement in web-authoring.

The site itself explains the concept; every HTML page is identical, graphic artists and web designers are only permitted to change the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to make a page that is unique.   The HTML contains the basic information and the CSS is used only for styling.   What happens is that you have a basic page that can be seen (or heard) on PCs, PDAs, phones, text-readers (for the sight-impaired) and perhaps for future applications to-be-invented.   All this for a basic HTML page that only needs to be written once, with few alterations.   The CSS can be changed to make style changes to one or thousands of pages.   Pretty heady stuff, y'all.

Another advantage to strict HTML and CSS implementation is the push for standardization of code and browser compliance with a set of standards, like those shown here at Web Standards Group.   That way a designer can be sure the code they write will be consistently shown by all browsers.   Things are much better now than they used to be, but still, when I write a single page, I test it one at least 5 of the major browsers just to make sure no one's 'left out of the loop'.   Accesability is a huge issue with us.   We've learned so much from free and easy access to the web, we want the web to be even more accessable to everyone.

Please, the next time you see a site that says, "Best Viewed with..." such-and-such a browser, drop them a little line asking them why, don't they know how to code for everyone?   Might send them back to the books, and that's better for everyone.   Rant over, for now. *grin*

'Til next time,