Building a Web Page... (or: tossing a penny into the Pacific Ocean)
Let's face it everyone, there are an awful lot of web-pages out there. I am just one of a massive and quickly growing number out there. On an individual web-builder level I equate it with being an asteroid blundering through the cosmos, fully aware that there are assorted stars, galaxies, black holes, and of course, more asteroids...
" Billyions and Billyions... " --Carl Sagan; almost any TV episode of "Cosmos"
With this in mind, it's like going to the public address system for the biggest mall in the world. What do you say? How do you say it? Do you care particularly if you insult anyone along the way? This also gives you that feeling of having so much to say that you aren't even sure where to begin. At least, that's what my feelings were once I realized I was capable of setting up a page.
I spent a bit of time on Netscape looking at various web sites asking myself, " What do I want it to look like? What is the feeling that the publisher I'm currently looking at trying to convey? Is this a feasible action for a guy like me with minimal art skills and nonexistent HTML know-how? Is this all really necessary?!? " A lot of questions and plenty of examples to choose from. Confusing, is'nt it?
I eventually realized that I did not want to exclude people because they did not have the latest and greatest browser and software to make the net come "virtually alive". I find pictures useful, as do most people. You can only convey so much with the ASCII character set. In all reality though, pictures only say so much. What about the context of a picture? If I showed you a picture of me standing in front of a supermarket with a baseball cap on, and my undergarments outside of my regular clothes you would expect some kind of set-up or caption for the picture. Either that or you guess that I'm a modern artist making some kind of obscure statement, which could be utterly wrong because I was trying to convey that modern undergarments are silly to look at and I was far too embarrassed to show any skin. Far fetched? Sure. But you get the point.
In the beginning of my telecommunications experience, I used my best friend's Atari 800 with a manual dial 300 baud modem; this was the early 80's that I'm speaking of, and back then your average Moe on the street would have said, "Inter-WHO?!?". I made the not-so-bold leap when I encountered the internet via the rich and monochromatic text of UNIX. Newsgroups were like BBS message bases, IRC was like chatting with the SysOp (but everyone spoke at once and you just got confused awfully quick), but lynx (a text based web browser) was an animal unto itself. As time went by, I realized more and more that few sites were not even close to being lynx friendly, but most could be blundered through with a bit of work. For the most part though, I stayed away from the web unless I had a specific need to be there, such as a dire need for a driver or wanted to check out a friend's site from a text point of view.
" You've come a long way baby... " -- a Virginia Slims cigarette ad.
Then one fine day, the people at work supplied us with Netscape. Pretty nifty I must say. Text and pictures, all in a package that made quite a bit more sense than that silly [IMAGE] marker lynx would always give me. From here I took note of folks out there who were willing to at least be somewhat lynx friendly and it still looked nice under Netscape. The idea was simplicity, smart good looks, and content. I also realized as I did more net-wandering (as opposed to 'net-surfing' the horribly worn out catchphrase that it is) that some pages only had a couple of pictures one of which would be their favorite character/theme/picture of them (and/or) their friends, a few lines of dull text and some links -- one of which would inevitably be to Yahoo or some other search engine.
Look, if you have not committed to memory the web address for Yahoo yet, get a pen and tattoo it on your leg. If this happened to be the first site ever mentioning Yahoo to you, my condolences and the link is: " http://www.yahoo.com/ " by the way -- and no, you will not find Yahoo in my links section.
The point is there is a lot of pointless stuff out there, there is also the good, bad, and outright wrong. I found myself more than once going " UGH! What was this guy thinking when he did this?!? ". Will some web-user say the same of my page? Possibly. Who cares. They won't come back, and I'm not going back to the sites I thought were dull either. So, to stick with the title's metaphor, the ocean has a lot of trash in it as well as sunken treasure. But there are also pennies to be found as well.
What do I mean by pennies? Well, what is a penny? It's worth money, perhaps not a lot, but with enough you can do something with them besides buy a gumball. A penny is also copper coated (the inside is zinc), and everyone knows that funky green color that copper turns when it oxidizes. What it boils down to is that even a single page site done by little Timmy, the youngest in his family of three brothers and how much he likes to play soccer and how he recaps his tales of high adventure with his GI Joes, or it could be Bob the CNE (Certified Netware Engineer) who argues the advantages and disadvantages of Cat-5 twisted pair v/s coaxial thinnet cable, and his favorite french toast with corn-pops recipe. Both sites technically are pennies in the ocean of 'stuff' on web pages. Whether or not you care about everything out there is moot, but occasionally a snippet here or there can give you a clue as to how other folks think -- and why.
With all of that in your head, let me finish by saying that while I want this site to be pretty, and there will be pictures here and there, some for decoration even, I will not let them crowd out the content. I will not be plunking in every new amazing net-do-dad in an effort to wow you with a "multimedia virtual experience" or nonsense like that. Plain text, pictures that have an application and won't be huge just because I want them to be huge. Will you want to read everything here? I hope you at least get a chance to read through everything, but you don't have to agree with everything.
So, tell me... Got a penny?
--Hex.
Topic Related Links: (which can be found in the "Box O Links" section)
Robert A. Jung; Electric Escape; "Simple Spinning";
http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/...
Dave Van Domelen; "The Web is for Information";
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~dvandom/...
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