| Home -> July 1997 -> A pinch of JavaScript |
Recently, I wrote to some friends to blow off some steam, and I asked them to stop on by ye olde homepage while I was at it. People wrote back to comment on the smoke, and some mentioned the home page.
Chris Lehmann, for instance, mentioned that he liked the home page, and considered it a good example of a "textual site". Now, I like Chris's site a lot. For starters, he's right on about the 1995 Oscars. His own action shots of Ultimate are also here, and he is good at capturing Ultimate. There is other stuff there, of course, but those shots are a good reason to take a look.
He definitely puts work into presentation. The nice background, use of tables to generate columns, the whole bit. That's good. For the same reason that writing should be interesting if you want people to read it, a homepage should look like more than your bookmark.htm file if you want people to drop by and visit.
I think I do that to some degree. Plenty of links, but placed in the context of what I call humor. Graphics, but not enough to slow you down, and formatted in a way that you can turn "auto-image-download" off, and not be greeted by a blank page with an image icon in the corner. (Hello, New York Times, are you listening?)
Yet, I still wondered if the label "textual" did not have some sort of backwards connotation to it. Not that I take offense, or anything, I just want to show that I'm more than just a one trick pony. I can steal Java and Perl scripts just as easily as I can steal html layout. So that is what I did with this page.
Now, this violates two personal rules of mine: Don't force people to load images, and don't do something compatible with only one browser. The .gifs above presumably loaded whether you wnted them or not if you are using Netscape, and the mouseover image effect does not work with Microsoft Explorer.
Well, I did this to prove a point, so I feel sorry about the forced download. If you use Explorer, then too bad. The link should work fine, in any case.
That's my trick for the day. I may jump through rings of fire later in the year. Stay tuned.
Last Updated: 26 July 1997
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