Mark Humphrys - Computers and Internet - Web page style

Web page style

HTML

• HTML

• HTML validation, link checking, etc.

• Things to be fixed on my pages:
  1. My use of bold tag. Browser should be able to deal with this.
  2. No width or height on images. Browser should be able to deal with this.
  3. No ALT tags for images. Browser should be able to deal with this by displaying the image file name.

Style

• My Computer Networks course
  • Web page style

• Human-Computer Interaction
• web page design
  • bad web page style
• net columns

• Web Pages That Suck has some hilarious videos:
  • These ones are very funny:

• useit.com by Jakob Nielsen
  • The Alert Box
    • Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
    • Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

• "This page optimized for ..." - arguing with customers by Jahn Rentmeister

• iQ Content (usability site in Ireland)
  • articles

• Long web pages
  • Rapid Navigation in Online Documents by Michael Hoffman
    • Enabling Extremely Rapid Navigation in Your Web or Document
      • Page Length: Short Pages Slow Down Knowledge Transfer; Linear Hypertext Speeds It Up - breaking texts into dozens of short web pages is bad design and takes much longer to read.
  • I agree with Hoffman on this point rather than with Jakob Nielsen, who promotes short web pages. Short pages make your finger sore from clicking, and take far longer to read.
  • In a genealogical paper I make a similar point that short pages (and a lot of clicking) make it hard to navigate family trees (see also here).

• Lists of links
  • Lists of links, it could be argued, are pretty pointless, since they represent only one person's idiosyncratic way of structuring the world. For anyone else, you'd be better off just starting afresh with Google. But I make mine public anyway, partly so I can access them myself from abroad.
  • The only thing that might make them useful to people other than me is that I do a lot of annotation of the lists. I weave them into a narrative, or organise them into a structure. I freely edit their titles. I don't know how anyone expects a hotlist-type bland list of links with their original titles intact to be useful.

• Creative linking
  • I try to creatively hyper-link. Why write JavaScript when you could write JavaScript. Why write Sartre when you could write Sartre. Why write Al-Qaida when you could write Al-Qaida. Why write Edward I when you could write Edward I. Why write Ulysses when you could write Ulysses. I try to bring you hard-to-find stuff and weave it into my pages. I try to make my pages part of the global conversation.

• snap.com - Interesting idea about showing pop-up previews of web pages as you hover over a link.

WAP and mobile Internet

I'm not worried about this any more. Anyone who sells such a restricted Internet access will simply be beaten in the marketplace by anyone offering full Internet access.

• WAP

• Clay Shirky
  • WAP and Intellectual Property
  • WAP's Closed Door Approach
• Jakob Nielsen
  • WAP Backlash
• Mike Banahan
  • Underwhelmed by WAP

• Google translates HTML to WML on the fly, so WAP users can view the Web after all. In a crippled, sort of pre-1993, way.

"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