Netscapegoating
After long and careful consideration, I have to decided to give my
pages over to the underworld of Netscape-specific tags and
extensions. There are myriad reasons for and against excluding
non-Netscape users from receiving these pages in a properly
decipherable form. In the end, though, I feel that the advantages
of using the enhancements I list below outweigh the benefits of
universal cross-platforminess.
Here are some reasons: as the WebWorld gets more competitive, it's the
visual and communicative impact of the finished page that really
counts. Purists who avoid alienating their Lynx-equipped users by
shooting their pages at the lowest common language denominator end
up losing design (read: job) opportunities to those unprincipled
bastards who are raping the system for everything it's got. Join or
die. It's the fancy stuff like this that seperates the sidewalk from
the freeway, and, perhaps more importantly, lets the presentation
of the material be as individual as the content.
Also, I was never above using things like tables in Microsoft Word
documents to align material not necessarily tabular in nature, or
using weird troff macros to craft elaborate forms. To me,
these underhanded manipulations along the limits of the language are
what makes computer programming as thrilling as it gets.
The "controversial" Netscape features I make use of --
controversial because some browsers misinterpret them and either omit
useful information (e.g. text inside tables) or display crap (c.f.
the way AOL's browser mauls gifs, stripping them of their
invisibility where applicable --
fall into the following three basic categories:
- Invisible Graphics as Leading
- This is a nifty trick that allows me to simulate variable inter-line
spacing and indentations. The usefulness of this lies in the ability
of spacing and indentation to designate orgnizational constructs
(like the way the heading above goes with this paragraph) in a purely
graphical form and without the use of extraneous (and by now tired)
characters like bullets or techniques like font-size changes.
- Tables
- Tables permit me to layout a page with control over my margins and
to position blocks of text and graphics in a way that is impractical
to do any other way. Face it: this page is easier to read than it
would be if the text stretched all the way from the right side of
your window to the left.
- Colors
- I'm referring here to the extensions of the <BODY>
tag that Netscape supports wherein you set the color of the
background and of the text and links. Simply put, I've always wanted
to do print documents that made use of color. That's expensive, and
has been basically unavailable to me in any practical fashion. The
Web is cheap. Here, finally, is a place where I can say "Lavender,
with indigo text" and have it happen. I find that this usually
doesn't cause any compatabililty issues with other kinds of browsers,
but I should mention that I compose my colors so that they please
me when my monitor is in 16-bit mode (i.e. "thousands" of colors).
Sometimes I check to see what they look like mapped to the Macintosh
8-bit system palette. Sometimes I don't. For best results, you'll
be reading this page in 16- or 24-bit color mode.
So that's all I have to say about the Netscape thing for now. It took
me a long time to come around to this decision, because I basically
agree that it would be better if the legibility of Web documents was
browser-independent. In essence, though, I'm conceding that graphical
organization and design is a crucial communicative channel of Web
documents these days.
Of course there's a fully Netscaped
version of this page!
Back to my Netscrap heap of a Home Page
ladelfa@iname.com
Last updated on 26 October 1995