More Technical Notes for the Geek

As I mentioned before, writing a personal webpage is such an egotistical endeavor ! ...
"My webpage" - My this, My that, pictures of ME ... gee, how self-oriented !  And yet, it is also a creative experience, and can be a learning experience, for we learn from each thing we accomplish. I do enjoy anything creative. The following technical notes are about writing the page and HTML; I just want to warn the non-geek that what's coming will be geekish. (By the way... See my Glossary for a "definition" of "Geek".)    8)

These Pages

My Graphical pages will look best in Netscape, version 4 or 3, at 800X600 resolution. Because that's what I use. But as I said before they should be viewable with just about any webpages - I am not doing anything too fancy - yet. If you should discover any bugs or problems, please let me know.

My Text-Only Pages should be suitable for Lynx. They work with my Lynx and with my ISP's version of Lynx. If they don't work with yours; sorry, there's nothing I know how to do about that.

HTML

I'd like to brag that I wrote these pages "by hand", with a text editor. Yes, with the text editor in one window, Netscape in another window, and reference book in hand, you can plug away at it quite well. I'd like to brag -- but I shouldn't -- the main reason I don't use some fancy do-it-all-for-you program is that I don't have one. I did download and try a few, but it always seemed more difficult to learn how to use a strange new program than to just learn how to write the code. ( Perhaps being an "old programmer" has something to do with it too. I've written in BASIC, Fortran, C, etc., so maybe banging it out is the natural way for me. That is, after all, what programming is. ) I did try using the Navigator Gold editor once, but it munches your files into an unrecognizable mass of gibberish. And there were other programs that did worse. I'd like to get a good writer-program to use as a learning tool and a way to produce code more quickly. But it must be one that saves it's files in plain, readable ASCII text with line breaks. If you would like to recommend one to me, please do so.

In my adventures I have talked to different people and heard a variety of opinions on writing HTML or Webpages. I say or because there are some people who write webpages and do not know HTML. I have been told that "no one will hire you to type all that out", and that "lots of real professionals write their own code" - both from the mouths of different computer professionals. The latter is a webmaster. There was a woman in my HTML class who is an expert at producing webpages with a program that writes it for you. She was taking the class because she needed to learn HTML to fix her code in ways that the programming package would not. She is proof of what Laura Lemay wrote: that professionals can use programs that write code to quickly generate large chunks of code; but if you care about what the results look like, you will always need to go in and edit the actual code. My opinion I think will be thus: That a "real professional" should learn how to use one or two code generators, but should also know how to write the actual HTML language without a code generating program. Why?  I want to be platform independent. I want to be able to write webpages on any computer; not just one that uses Windows or any one particular program to write the code. If you make yourself or your business dependent on one particular platform/product, and things change - computers change - then where are you?  Of course, people's preferences depend on where they are coming from.  I want to learn it both ways.

Most of what I know so far in HTML I learned from an older book of Laura Lemay's.  I recommend her highly.  In that book I also learned about the "philosophy" of HTML and what it was supposed to be. Web"pages should be platform independent. (And that does not mean they work in Windows 2000 and Windows NT.) You should not assume that the user has the same computer or programs or operating system or hardware that you do. You should not assume that they are using a computer at all. (They may be using Web TV. Or even a terminal of some type??)  They should also be content oriented. Let the meaning of what you have to say or present determine the forms in which it is presented.

Anyway... what I'm aspiring to is to learn more about HTML: to learn to write better pages and do more things, especially the practical kinds of things that can make a webpage a useful tool. I'd like to learn how to do credit card order forms, check forms, and other ways to make a useful business webpage.  And of course I want to do cool artistic stuff too!

What I do not want to do is to make pages that are excessively image-intensive, so that they take a long time to load (unless high Art is the purpose of the page). I don't like pages that are too "busy" - littered with flashing popping things competing for your attention. I find the constantly changing advertisement banners on some websites to be annoying. But what I really get opinionated about is "tricks". That's what I call it when webpages pop up a window or display a banner that's made to look like a system message, to fool ignorant people into clicking on it and whisking them away to another, and possibly unrelated, webpage. I think such "tricks" are bad form, if not somewhat unethical. And another thing... the Amazon.com and Altavista Digital Trick. Try searching for a nonsense string on Altavista. Try it. Type in "Goobletyboogers" and see what you get. You will see a result - even if no pages are found - suggesting that Amazon.com has products relating to Goobletyboogers and books on Goobletyboogers. Their page is an automatic lie generator. I do not like being lied to.

Anyway...

The next step for me will be learning to use forms and cgi scripts. If you have any suggestions or helpful comments, E-Mail them my way.

More Notes ?

There will be more. On my graphical pages. But I don't know if I will ever update THIS text-only page.