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Digressions

A few words about pictures in general

I appreciate a good image, and I will be posting some here. At the same time, I appreciate words, and I understand that there are times when words can communicate better — and more vividly — than any picture. I hope to demonstrate here that I can recognize both situations.

I also am aware of the variety of browsers and systems in use. Some browsers support HTML frames; some don't. Some monitors work at 1280x1024, or even higher resolutions; others top out at 640 x 480. Some people, bless 'em, are still riding DOS bareback, and probably using text-only browsers like Lynx. Some folks turn images off because they are fed up with the waste of time for downloading them. Small-screen devices like Palm pilots and Web-equipped cellular phones are becoming common; their users want as few images as possible. And of course there are visually-impaired people on the Web. They might want larger type, or need to run the content through a text-to-speech device.

Image formats are another issue. There are strong incentives to switch from GIF to PNG; but browser support for the features of PNG images is generally incomplete. Flash is a complication. So is Adobe's rapid advance from Acrobat version 3 through 4, 5 and 6 to 7 (though the availability of free readers helps). Vector formats would be nice in some situations — if browsers could handle them. (JPEG — even progressive-scan — is well supported, thank the gods of the Internet.)

Then there's the issue of color palettes. These became important when most video cards were limited to 256 colors (8 bits of color depth). For complicated reasons, this led to the well-known palette of 216 "Web-safe" colors that minimized the unpleasant effects of browsers straining to match the colors in certain images. Now that "high-color" (16-bit) and "true-color" (24-bit) video cards are common, some say that Web-safe colors are no longer needed. But a technical analysis does not support this; and in any case "common" does not mean "universal" (The linked article puts the current population of 8-bit-color users as 6 percent.)

It all adds up to what the Chinese might call "interesting times".

Web Page Design Standards

My goal is to design pages that work well at all resolutions, from the VGA standard (640 x 480, 256 colors) up through the high end (which I think means 32-bit color at 1280 x 1024). However, I work mostly at 1024x768 resolution, so you might find pages that don't look good on your screen. If you find such a case, I'll be happy to hear about it. Please drop me an E-mail and let me know.

Where I use HTML frames, I'll include a <NOFRAMES> section for older browsers. (And it won't just tell you to upgrade your browser.) Frames are useful mainly as an easy way to divide the viewport into fixed and scrollable portions. The increasing maturity of CSS standards, and their correct implementation by browser makers, gives me an alternative means of doing this. (True, it's currently tricker than frames.) I'm not creating any new framed pages, and I'll probably be phasing them out entirely at some point.

I want to accomodate text-only browsing and aural readout as well. I will always place an ALT tag in my image calls, so that those using text-only browsers will know what the image represents. And I will try to keep the size of my image files to the minimum compatible with clarity. (For JPEGs, the most common format on the Web, I've observed that anything below about 20k bytes often begins to look blurry or chunky.) Aural readers are likely to be poorly served for some time to come, since I'm just starting to learn about this mode.

I'm also still getting up to speed on HTML 4.01 and CSS2 style sheets. I'll be validating all my pages against both those standards. I'm in the middle of converting to HTML 4.01 Strict. However, in a few places I'll stick with features that only validate as 4.01 transitional. The prime example is the "Target" attribute of the Anchor tag. I know of no other way to launch a page in a new window.

The bottom line is: Although I've been at this game a while, there might still be some rough spots in my new pages. Bear with me. And remember that constructive criticism is always welcome.