This site works more or less the way I wish the whole Web worked. (Try squeezing your browser window to odd shapes while viewing any page in the site.) Its pages should load pretty fast even on dialup, it's easy to read on your screen, and the navigation is, I hope, simple and intuitive. Once I post a page about a subject, its Internet URL never changes, or hardly ever.
I'm especially interested in Web design for intranets inside companies. I think this is a critical neglected means of coordination within organizations, especially in for-profit companies, and I think most companies are doing it wrong, or not trying, or not even aware of the opportunity. For more, see my page on managing information overload.
I also want to remind people about the roots of the Web, the way it was supposed to work in the beginning. Way too many sites are hard-coded so they require horizontal scrolling if your browser window is less than 1024 pixels wide at the moment. Some even arrogantly set your browser window to full-screen when you load their home page. All my pages are set up to fluidly re-wrap, anytime you feel like re-sizing your browser window.
There's no intent here for anyone to ever sit down and read all of this site. It's meant to be consulted as a reference. As relevant issues come up, you can come here and see what, if anything, I have to say on the subject, and then do as you think best.
In early August 2007 I began checking the HTML code of this site using a couple of online tools including W3C's HTML validator. Two-thirds of the site's pages were validated within a few days. There was a remaining issue with formatting of nested lists that took me longer to resolve. As of 15 September all pages on this site were validated.
Web pages that display the
button, such as this one, are claiming to be validated, and are supposed to be coded so that any user can verify the page still passes the test by clicking the button. Except for the button in this paragraph and on the
home page, I have my buttons in page footers.
Why validate? Speed! With a document type declaration and character encoding specified at the top of every page, and validated "well-formed" HTML, one expects to keep the browser out of quirks mode, for faster page loading and better function overall. For more about this, see the Validation section of my Web design page.
Operating in standards compliance mode, however, summoned up an oddity of Internet Explorer (IE) that I hadn't been confronting in quirks mode. For a few days before 21 August, links between pages in this site were producing cryptic error boxes reading "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site [URL]. Operation aborted."
It turns out that IE, or at least IE6, seems to give special meaning to the anchor name Top, and doesn't like it in interpage links within a site, when not in quirks mode. So I changed to something else.
Whenever you see a paragraph on this site formatted like this:
... or like this --->
... that's what I consider a sidebar. On this site, sidebars are extra content you can skip without missing any main points.* Some will be full-width like any other paragraph, some will be "floated" to the margin with the main text wrapped around.
Text formatted like this with a light yellow background is a warning of some sort.
This is a style I came up with that I named direwarning. If you see one of these (not too often) best read it.
I'd like to think everything else here is self-explanatory. There are only four navigation elements:
Section menus, which link to other pages within a section, are formatted as definition or bullet lists with no borders. Some pages with section menus have a little content relating to the subject matter of the whole section. Page menus, which jump down to subheads on the same page, are number lists with a dashed border, usually floated to the right margin with the start of the page content wrapped around them, as on this page.
I don't know if anybody else gets this, but I think of the dashed-line border of the page menu as a reference to the rest of the page it's on, symbolizing the relationship between the menu and the page.
I used to document acronyms by following them with the full text in parentheses. Now I sometimes use <ACRONYM> tags instead, with a title attribute and a CSS dashed blue underline, as seen in this sentence. Explanatory title text will appear if you hover the acronym with your mouse.
Page footers on this site all show a date last modified for the page which is dependent on JavaScript. If JavaScript is disabled in your Web browser, the last-modified dates and copyright notices will be missing from the footers.
Right after Web popup ads appeared there was a brief fad for disabling JavaScript. Now that even IE6 has some popup blocking, and modern browsers like Firefox are good at it, very few users disable JavaScript.
FreeFind indexes my site for the site search function about every two weeks, unless I request a scan myself. I change stuff on these pages pretty much constantly. You can tell about when my site was last spidered, if you want, by checking the latest date you see on the what's new page. Comparing that to the date in the footer of my home page will tell you if anything has changed since then.
My home page invites you to window your browser and states "this site is 100% fluid, no hard-coded widths." You may even find this site easier to read with your browser windowed, because of the shorter line lengths.
The only exceptions to fluid text are a few places where I give code examples using HTML preformatted text, such as DOS XCOPY batch file examples on my backups page and in JavaScript code for page modify dates.
Preformatted text doesn't wrap. This is appropriate in these few code examples to make the syntax of the code clear. Depending on your video mode and browser font settings, you may need to maximize your browser or scroll horizontally when viewing those examples. I try to keep the code lines short enough so that most people won't even need to maximize the browser.
I've had this button in the footer of my home page since 1997. For years (for lack of a better idea) it linked to browser download pages: first Netscape, then Opera, and lately Firefox.
Now it links to the Viewable with Any Browser Campaign, which advocates that Web pages published on the global open Internet should be functional in any browser a user is likely to use, rather than coded for any particular browser. This is one of the original design goals of the Web going back to its beginning at CERN. The campaign site gives relevant guidance on HTML coding, most of which is stuff I've been recommending for years.
Anyone who slaps a "this page is best viewed with Browser X" label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network. (Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996)
I'd go a bit farther than that quote now: putting "best viewed with" language on a Web page anytime since about 2000 amounts to an admission of incompetence.
This site should be functional in all the most-used browsers, meaning Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Opera, and Netscape, in priority order. When there's a conflict between the results of CSS formats in IE6 and the results in the other browsers, which happens fairly often, I'm willing to settle for optimum results in the modern browsers, especially Firefox, and functional, not-too-ugly results in IE6.
There appears to be a bug in Opera 8.5x running on Windows 98 that interferes with the function of my top links. Most of my content pages, including this one, have a link-list page menu at the top, that jumps downward in the page to section headings. In those Opera versions on Win98, if you click on a link in that link list first, the top links on that page will work; if not, they won't, and you'll have to scroll.
I verified this in versions 8.51, 8.53 & 8.54, and no doubt it happens in 8.52 as well. To check your Opera version, in the menus go to Help, About Opera. Opera versions 9.0+, 8.0, and 7.x work fine, as do IE6, all versions of Firefox, and SeaMonkey.
| Date | Comments |
|---|---|
| 5/96 | First version had the Internet clients table and PC maintenance and Net links pages. Bought Laura Lemay's HTML book. All testing with Netscape Navigator. |
| 6/96 | Added Dilbert-cube picture to home page. |
| 10/96 | Added RSACi and SafeSurf PICS ratings |
| 1/97 | First frames version: horizontal navigation frame with GIF pushbuttons (somebody get me an aspirin) |
| 4/97 | Added site map. All complex Web sites should have text maps, in my semi-humble opinion. |
| 6/97 | Guilted into doing some testing with Mosaic 2 and Explorer 3. Added vertical navigation frame option (also with buttons). |
| 7/97 | Submitted my URL to Alta Vista, Yahoo, and others. |
| 9/97 | Added short text links navigation frames (after seeing the site on a feeble old Mac II in 640×480 video mode). Total of four nav-frame options offered in this period. |
| 12/97 | Found Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox on the Net. Started testing CyberSpyder link checker robot. Finally found out the <BASE> tag belongs in the header, in frames pages. D'oh! |
| 1/98 | Changed back to a no-frames layout, after a year of using various frames designs. Added page links to the Computech user-pages search page. |
| 3/98 | Made my recumbent bicycles content into a separate page. |
| 1/99 | Registered CyberSpyder link checker last month; ran it 1/9/99, and fixed all bad and redirected links. Added Netscape and Infi.net color charts (considering getting rid of "paper" background texture in favor of solid colors, for improved readability). |
| 12/99 | (Acquired used 512K PalmPilot Personal) |
| 1/00 | Moved site from Verio Spokane to Icehouse Net Services; removed direct email links, as an anti-spam measure; and switched from tiled paper-texture background to blue left-border effect, transparent background area. Added Web-browser tips and tricks page. |
| 3/00 | Added cascading style sheets (CSS)
|
| 5/00 | Reorganized all pages and implemented new breadcrumb-menu navigation scheme; reduced average page size from 21K to 7K (34 files to 91). |
| 6/00 | Added advertising-supported free site search courtesy of Searchbutton.com. PalmPilot/PDA content becomes separate page. |
| 3/01 | Switched to advertising-supported free site search courtesy of FreeFind; Searchbutton.com sent notices 3/3/01 they were discontinuing free site search service. Changed email feedback links in page footers from Juno to Excite Mail, due to uneven performance and poor design of the Juno Web-mail interface. Switched from Dilbert-cube picture to Tour des Lacs picture on home page. |
| 5/01 | Added small search box in navigation bar of home page, in addition to separate search page (5/15/2001). Removed search page table about usage of qualifiers and wildcards, replaced with mention of "search tips" link on results pages. |
| 7/01 | Greatly expanded my recumbent bicycle dealers pages, using a Google links-toolbar search button; in 2001 there were links to more than 390 dealers listed on the Web pages of BikeE, Vision, Rans, and Burley. |
| 1/02 | Changed from simple but too-long nested-list site map to more usable table-based map. |
| 6/02 | Changed from Excite-mail page footer links to Lycos mail (Excite had been giving me browser errors when trying to display messages) |
| 4/04 | Reworked table alignment CSS coding for all pages |
| 5/04 | Resumed automated link checking with 32-bit version of CyberSpyder |
| 6/04 | Switched to Andale Mono monospace as first-choice font for code examples (was Courier New) and URLs (was Verdana sans-serif) |
| 7/04 | Created "sidebar" CSS class, with 90%-size sans-serif text and blue left border, to more clearly identify ancillary material. Changed CSS font weight for all headings to normal, instead of the default bold. |
| 10/04 | Re-expanded my recumbent bicycle dealers pages to 349 dealers linked, using info from the Sun/EZ-1 and Burley sites' dealers pages. This resource was originally put together in 2001 based on the BikeE, Vision, and Rans sites, which were then the Big Three. BikeE and Vision went out of business in 2002 and early 2004, respectively, and a lot of that business eventually went to Sun and Burley. |
| 10/04 |
Passed the Web Design Group and
W3C CSS validators. You can click the button to validate my site's primary style sheet, or click the following link to validate my
alternate style sheet.
|
| 6/05 | Got rid of inline whitespace control using resized single-pixel transparent GIF, in page footers, and repeated non-breaking space HTML entities, in link lists; replaced with CSS style declarations in the site style sheet. Changed from Lycos-mail page footer links to Yahoo! Mail. |
| 7/05 | Added Spam defense page |
| 10/05 | Reorganized Inland Northwest links pages; formerly there were separate Spokane #1, Spokane #2, and North Idaho pages. This is the first time I've actually changed any page filenames on this site, but I couldn't think of a good alternative. I plan to leave the placeholder pages up for at least six months. |
| 10/05 | Simplified site map coding for better results in Opera and to eliminate horizontal scrolling in IE6. |
| 11/05 | Added Mobile computing and separate Browser Wars pages |
| 5/06 | Added Cell phone links page |
| 6/06 | Added CSS links rollover and printer-friendly formatting (the CSS rollover formats work in Firefox and Opera 8+ but not in Internet Explorer version 6). |
| 10/06 | Pulled placeholder pages from 10/05 reorganization of Inland Northwest pages, see above. |
| 4/07 | Switched from CyberSpyder link tester to the much faster Xenu's Link Sleuth. |
| 8/07 | Began checking site code using the Web Design Group and W3C HTML validators. |
| 9/07 | Switched all first and second level headings in the site (H1, H2 tags) from Verdana first choice to more-informal Comic Sans MS first choice. The smaller third level and below headings seemed better left in Verdana. This required changing one line in one style sheet file into two lines, and took about a minute. |
| 9/07 | All site code now passes the Web Design Group and W3C HTML validators. Pages that have the "W3C HTML 4.01" button in the footer, such as this one, are claiming to be validated, and any user can verify the page still passes the test by clicking the button. |
| 3/08 | Switched first-choice font for code and URL elements from Web font Andale Mono to native Win2000 and WinXP font Lucida Console, which looks very similar. Most 2000/XP users were probably seeing those elements in Courier New. |
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