About These Web Pages January 2, 2008

I have grown up using computers and the internet. I can still recall the days when I would dial up my local BBS and connect at 300 baud. I was on Delphi in 1993, connected at a blazing 1200 baud, when they first offered internet access. There was no world wide web then. These were the days of gopher, archie and ftp. As the www evolved with its graphic burdened content, higher bandwidth developed, or at lest spread, at a much slower pace. This led me to have a certain disdain for pointless graphics on web pages. As a result I had always been conscientious to create text-only web pages. The exception being my pictures pages. But at least you were not innocently subjected to these. You had to click the link knowing that you were loading graphics. I also chose to write my web pages in text editors like vi or notepad, thus eliminating additional bloat.

Old habits are hard to break. I do include a lot of graphics these days, but I still code my web pages by hand. That is, I do not use a wysiwyg editor or other html web page generator. After several years of chiding from my internet friends - most of these guys are twenty-something, CS majors, well versed in the art of Cascading Style Sheets and Java script - I finally decided to learn a little CSS and PHP. These pages render very nicely in IE 7. But there are some problems with browsers like FireFox and Opera. In particular with tables and unordered lists. There may also be some problems with different versions of IE. I will get around to correcting this. In the meantime, please bear with me.