I don't do crossword puzzles, and if we start them at all
in our family, jigsaw puzzles usually end up unfinished, with numerous important
pieces somewhere underneath our sofa. I'm not a very good tinkerer and only
when compelled to will I try and fix things around the house. I've often joked
that my favorite hobby is taking a nap. But it still
seems that all of us apparently seek out some sort of
hobby. For me, if and when I have free time (whatever that is) I like to
play around with building small internet sites.
It was only last month that
I confessed that I'd completed my work on a long-running web site of mine (and
I tried to examine the effect that completing that site had on me). But although
I claimed that the site in question had been completed, I didn't exactly mean
that work on it had come to an end. Finished or not, I'm still planning to do
some under-the-hood work on that site.
To a large extent, what I love about site building is how
easy it is. Perhaps the true beauty of HTML is in how
incredibly simple it actually is. What, after all, could be more satisfying
than one-click publishing? But although it's very easy, it can also be very
time consuming - and not only because there's always something new that does
a lightbulb click above my head and whispers to me "write about me as well".
It's also time consuming because sometimes I can't resist wasting
a great deal of time trying to work out some petty detail. If while browsing
I find a site that makes me exclaim "I want my site to look like that",
I can often devote more time that is logically reasonable to figuring
out how it was done so that I can perhaps use it on a page of my own.
I'm lucky to not be a lone HTMLer. Instead, over the
years I've had my hands in numerous projects which, among other things, have
benefited from the work of people considerably more technically adept than I
am, who strive to design pages that are quite a bit more complex than what I
would be willing to settle for, or capable of on my own. As I've worked on these
sites (and with these people) I've continually had the opportunity to get a
picture of what's currently possible. Sometimes
it's clear to me that we're dealing with excesses and I see no need for these
technological "improvements". At other times, however, it's enchantment
at first glance, and I know that I'll want to use these possibilities myself.
When this happens I'll either immediately get to work making use of these technical
wonders, or I'll file them away into a reservoir of possibilities, waiting
for the right moment to make the best use of them.
So which is it? Do I want my HTML as plain as can be, a few tags that do just
what HTML was originally intended to do - format text and some graphics on a
web page so that it can be properly read? As much as I'm attracted to this,
I'm well aware that readers tend to scratch their heads when they encounter
text that might just as well be in a book. You can almost hear them asking themselves:
"I came all the way to the World Wide Web for this?". And quite frankly,
to a great extent I understand them. So does that mean that I'm always on the
lookout for some neat technical features that will make my pages seem as though
they belong to this century, and perhaps in that way even succeed in camouflaging
the fact that I don't always have something of interest to write? Truth be told,
I'm rather purposefully inconsistent on this matter. On the one hand I'm a minimalist
who believes that HTML was invented not for web designers, but "for the
rest of us". On the other, I can't deny that sometimes a bit of cosmetics
can actually improve looks, and when a page looks good, people may even read
it.
And sometimes the answer is much simpler, and has nothing
to do with content at all. Getting a page to appear on the web as we originally
envisioned it in our minds is an enjoyable challenge. Even if it doesn't enhance
the reading experience, text that appears on a page or disappears from it with
the click of a link can add a bit of interest
to the page. Rollover images showing a situation before and after
can sometimes be instructive. Presenting the same text, but highlighted differently
according to different parameters can heighten our awareness of what we're reading.
Figuring out how to achieve each of these, and more, is stimulating and thought
provoking. And when it comes down to it, tinkering can simply be a lot of fun.
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