Why the he.. did you make this page look so boring?
Some people ask me just that. The quick answer: I read Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. I liked it. It made sense.
Ok, according to my printer, the book is about 400 pages, and in great contrast to many other publications available on the web for free (yes, it's free!), it is actually both well-written (to the extent of being downright amusing) and packed with content. There is no point in me trying to recap it all here (hey, I don't even understand half of that database stuff). Go read it yourself.
However, there's one particular quote I want to convey to you:
The more HTML you know, the uglier and harder to use your site is likely to be.
(from the summary of the Learn to Program HTML in 21 Minutes chapter.)
Despite the seemingly contradicting nature of this quote, it appears to be spot on for the vast majority of web-pages on the net.
Ok, so that book instructed me to make my pages look boring? No, actually I thought of that all by myself. In short, designing pages that are both beautiful and functional are extremely hard. Chances are, the attempt to spice up the layout and look will result in degraded functionality. Unless of course, one has a special talent for making beautiful web-pages while maintaining the functionality. I'm pretty sure I'm not one of those people. So, with the assumption that the visitors of my humble homepage doesn't come here to see what I can to with Photoshop, javascript and colors, I went with the boring, or should I say content emphasizing, approach.
As an added bonus, these pages should be readable in just about any browser, which would be smart if I actually had some interesting content here. In fact, I think that's pretty smart, even without the content. So there!
Ok, back to index, which is where I assume you came from.
January, 11th., 1999. Christian Figenschou - <figen@figen.com>.