Simplicity, carried to an extreme, becomes elegance.
Jon Franklin
I am not a web designer, as should be painfully obvious from these pages, nor do I intend to become one. Indeed, I wish most web designers were doing less design and focusing more on helping people deliver accessible content.
Content, in my case, is mostly text, so that's what I'm trying to deliver. Preferably readable text, with as little as possible to distract from the text itself. I try to follow standards and try to avoid using images purely for decoration or for navigational purposes. The images that I use on the site carry at least some meaning themselves.
These pages should be readable with just about any HTML browser in existence, including cell phone browsers, text-only browsers, speech synthesizers and Braille displays. In short, they are Best Viewed With Any Browser.
There are no Livescr... Javascr... um... ECMAscripts or whatever they are called this week on my pages. Don't get me wrong --- I adore interactivity, I just don't think web pages are a good carrier of interactivity. If you want a proper interactive interface, use proper tools and write a true application, not piggybacking on something that wasn't mean to be used this way.
I don't do cookies, unless you count the ones baked in an oven. I have no use for them and I think they might be used for evil purposes.
I use a simple stylesheet only to increase legibility on CSS capable browsers. I use it mostly to set a the maximum width of the text, though this is sadly ignored by some browsers which are not yet CSS compliant.
Annoyingly, much information on the interwebs is out of date, but even more annoying is that it is so hard to tell if it is out of date or sparkling new. To remedy this problem at least on my own pages I include a timestamp at the bottom of each ordinary HTML file unless it is otherwise dated.
For good and sometimes humourous takes on web design, please see:
Most of the HTML files under my web pages were generated by a modified version of txt2tags, except the lists under hacks and files which were produced by a small Perl script called flist.
The rather minimal CSS stylesheet was written by hand.
The HTML and CSS files have been validated with W3C's HTML Validator and the CSS Validator to make sure they follow the standards. You should probably do the same if you publish anything on the web.
The sitemap was built by Daniel Naber's tree.pl.
Ordinary BSD make from FreBSD was used to
automatically rebuild HTML files if anything had changed.
PDF and Postscript files were usually produced with either TeX, using LaTeX macros, or Groff, a free version of troff, usually using my own macros.
However, some of the Postscript files were written by hand by myself, mostly just for the fun of it.
The images may have been manipulated with ImageMagick, NetPBM, swiggle or xv.
All text was written with GNU Emacs, a Lisp based operating system cunningly disguised as a text editor.