RANT ZONE 

Click here for explanation of the lack of graphics on this page

Anti-graphics rant

Please support the principle of avoiding forcing people to wait for graphics to download and never, never, feel obliged to include them just because we are led to believe it looks "professional". 

The first person I  showed my site to reacted:
"Good. uncluttered site - I mean no graphics, downloads quickly...  I hate sites where it takes ages for the home page to appear. "   

Remember, you are not always better of with something, often you are better off without something, as many of those who logged onto the (professionally designed) world orienteering champs website discovered.  Contrast with the amateur BOF website which has very few graphics and is totally understandable without them.  (Actually, this is more important:  it's OK to have graphics provided people don't have to include them when they browse your site - that is to say the site should be understandable with the graphics option turned off.)

Good principle that: no graphics on your homepage.   Click here to read 'simple sites' article.  (Argues in favor of simple sites on grounds of needs of portable internet devices)  

It remains to be seen whether this will mean everyone will be expected to do 2 versions of their site.  Still, don't include gratuitous graphics unless you do in fact only want to appeal to corporate users on T1 lines.  Maybe that's what 'look professional' means, only professionals ever get to look at it, everyone else loses patience and goes elsewhere.  (On the other hand, it could mean you're supposed to hire a professional to design your website instead of simply disseminating information in plain English.) 

This also applies to background music et al. Although this may sound unbelieveable to some people, there are in fact a lot of people in this world who do not actually want to listen to music on a 24 hour basis, and furthermore, many of those that do have already got it playing in the background before they start surfing the net, and far from putting them in the right mood to spend some money  (or whatever you're hoping to achieve), you'll just piss them off because it will interfere with whatever they wanted to listen to in the first place.

Also we're all better off most of the time without 'themes'  (background graphics et al that are all too easily incorporated when you develop your site from frontpage), and anything else than makes you site harder to download, harder to read, and harder to resist the temptation to indulge in a little computer rage against the scrawny 17 year old sitting at the adjacent terminal who's downloading 400k .gifs of his soccer team's latest star signing.  "Never use themes, we were told"  (to quote one of my lodgers), "When someone recognises the theme they just realise you haven't put any effort into the site..."

Yes I know any decent browser has the option to turn off various categories of garbage, but sometimes (eg at college) the options page is disabled.   Come to think of it, the professionals who wrote the WOC99 website  (for the world orienteering champs) found a way to get around the disabling of sounds, I was not impressed when Scotland the Brave came belting out of my speakers at 0100.  Some of us have to share our homes with other people, surprise surprise!  Will we see an arms race between the defenders  (browser writers) and attackers  (website designers) with the latter trying to breach the ever more sophisticated defensive software of the former, as they try to force feed crap to the surfers?   Oh well, it all makes jobs for the boys I suppose, what a pity I haven't got one yet.

    (OKOK.. I admit it, at the time of writing this, surfers on my O-page get force-fed chariots of fire, but now I know it works I'm removing it at the next revision).  Would it not be simpler to just ban all internet graphics?  I've half a mind to team up with the anti-porno lobby to see if we can make this reality, only trouble is................. well actually they wouldn't let me have a credit card.   I guess people like me will just be consigned to the dropouts fringe of the web, and everyone will pooh-pooh my site because it doesn't fade in and out or go bom bom bom or slide up and down, rotate, flash, wink, etc.

OK.  Maybe I'm being impatient but even with a 56k MODEM, the fastest presently available unless you go up to an ISDN line (and even that's only supposed to be twice as fast compared to the theoretical maximum of a 56k MODEM) they are still too slow, even the thumbnails are a pain.    (Actually I don't think the MODEM speed is very relevant; when your end of the web's congested, your MODEM speed isn't the limiting factor., this may be complete bull...?)

All graphics are a pain unless you know you're waiting for something you want.  Of course I agree, graphics make a website look great and come alive, but then you're not very alive when you're waiting for them to load,  is the graphics thing not just another symptom of the contagion of idleness in our society whereby people want to look at pictures rather than read prose...?   Or is it just the world beating to Bill Gates' drum, his interest in going to the movies, and the gradual manipulation of society etc.... continued on pages 53 - 167.   No, it's because too many people just have to play with the latest toy that comes along then when they've found out how to write the JAVA code to get it to flash / move about / grow larger and smaller, they just have to prove to the world they can do it and force-feed it to everyone.

Graphics also force web designers to split up their sites into a larger number of smaller pages, not much more than a screenful at a go, indeed I bet there are web designers who work on the principle of the punters should never be expected to use the scroll bars / PgDn / mousewheel etc.  In fact, we may even see a punters' version of windows that doesn't have scrollbars and other complicated hard-to-understand concepts that aren't required on a 'properly designed' website, then everyone will have to adopt the MS way of thinking.

So not only do you have to wait longer for pages to download, you also have to download more often.   I even suspect there are designers who deliberately try to fix it so people like me who normally have the graphics disabled can't make sense of their pages in the absence of the graphics.  Burn in hell you fiends, and I'm getting better all the time at making sense of your efforts minus your beautiful pictures (even if it does sometimes cause a sensation  reminiscent of finding your way out to the washrooms in the pitch dark in some strange Youth Hostel you've never been to before) 

Let's have some more creative technical terms to describe the internet equivalents of words such as 'tabloid', 'the sun', 'glossy brochure', what else..?    Let me see....  junk graphics,  junk jingles, logomania, ketchup mentality, in other words, just plain junk.     (back to top)

Simon's favorite grumbles about the internet:

1   Whoever was responsible for making file names and directories case sensitive should definitely go to hell when he dies.

2   This business about .htm and .html files is another cockup.  Again, like case sensitivity, why not just fix things so they're equivalent.  Also why not make underscores and minus signs equivalent on the net... actually on second thoughts, make them illegal characters, or ignorable, so simon_beck would be equivalent to simonbeck

3   Gratuitous graphics  (I hardly need include this in the light of the foregoing!)

4   People who grumble about pornography.  If you don't want it don't look at it.  (And don't you make that point about getting unrequested messages about it, I've had just 5 such messages in 8 months, so if you're getting a lot more, it's probably your own fault for visiting the wrong sites in the first place, or maybe doing something silly such as sending some sort of message to the offending sites asking for no further postings!

5   People who put Java on their site.   I'm tired of having to click away messageboxes informing me about some error in someone's attempt at Java.   Alternatively, let's just make all java error message boxes an optional extra for the geeks, everyone else simply makes do without whatever effect the code was meant to cause.    (Not necessarily the fault of the website owner, indeed, I've had this problem with my own website  (= this one) some occasions I've tested it)

6    

7   Microsoft software that is essentially written on the presumption that everyone's ideal fantasy lifestyle is that of Bill Gates and revolves round spending the maximum possible amount of time in one's incredibly hi-tech home, watching movies, with ones computer permanently switched on (and logged onto the internet).  Not that I've got anything against Bill G, quite the reverse, the world has him to thank, IMHO, for the fact that computers are something everyone can afford, and we're not still in the dark days of everyone being locked into propietary hardware and software  Just remember, Bill, and everyone else:  Computers are just machines and like all machines, they're there to serve us, not the other way round, incidentally that applies to motor vehicles also, how many times have I invited a friend to come out for a run / mountain biking (etc) and he's had to cry off due to some task in connection with some piece of machinery he owns, I drive a modest  (group 6) car, and as they say, it's what you do with it that counts. 

See the way ones websurfing 'history' is kept for x days, where x is a number that one may set (in view / internet options / general i think) from 0 to 9.   9 is considered the upper limit and may well be sensible for the gatesian lifestyle where any likely site will be visited at least once a week and probably a lot more often.  But for those whose lifestyles do not quite so much revolve around their PC, this also means that when you return from any sort of break, your temorary internet files will have been wiped next time you log on and everything has to be downloaded again  (not sure this is right, even so, I'd prefer to be asked b4 a load of stuff is wiped off,

I resent it when I am prevented from using my own equipment I've paid good money for, in the manner I wish, just because someone somewhere thinks he knows best and the software wipes a whole load of stuff I've paid more money and spent time to download, because it's supposed to be 'convenient' and 'automatic'.  Automatic is a 2 edged sword, all too often it means taking control away from the consumer.

.You are visitor number   Oh damn. My server doesn't support front page extensions so I'll never know.  Yes, the empire has struck again.  (Actually I've fixed it so "the counter.com" sends me an e-mail once a week to tell me the hit count, oddly, after many days in a row with zero hits, then there was one day last week with 17 hits.  What went wrong that day???)  (Actually, when I've been surfing someone else's site, I've seen "the counter"  increment the hit counter every time I've navigated from page to page by going back via the home page,  so the counter's statistics need to be treated with a healthy  (or unhealthy) pinch of NaCl).

And now for some Microsoft lattyn........  even worse than 'porci vis musca'

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