A Request for Your Kind Consideration

Ah! I confess to be one engaging in the creation of (my own) html
pages, and lacking any professional skill: a plodding amateur of
a coder who is, at best, a dabbler; a hacker with a hand ax
rather than a sculptor with a fine blade -- a mere dilettante if
I may dare to put the finest luster on it.

Now you have my confession, and I hope you will read one more line...

I have been moving from html 4.01 loose to strict -- and was
surprised today when one of my pages validated! Surprise? Did I
read somewhere that a good coder should never be surprised at
what his code does? Again I confess; to being surprised when it
works, and baffled when it does not!! Ah, but I am distracted...

So this page is personal, my art; Collage created with the GIMP
with articles and verse done in ASCII... and I don't know if the
page is less art, or more, then the contents...

Is it wrong to create a web page as art, less a conveyance of its
content, than content itself?


So I'm a dilettante (I'm bragging), with no hope of making a
dime, and not but time to spend, and yet I've put up a page for
what? For what: for self satisfaction, or ego, of course...

But, I ramble...

May I ask that you take a look? To comment on what catches your
eye, or sense of propriety?


http://www.geocities.com/gamcclary/art.html


Are my efforts a total loss?
Is there any hope of redemption?
Sometimes seeming cruel Truth is the true mercy.

Thanks for your comments

gam


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if direct email is required, remove the dot from where it is
found to where it should be.

gam <g.mcclary@yahooDOTcom> wrote:

Ah! I confess to be one engaging in the creation of (my own) html
pages, and lacking any professional skill: a plodding amateur of
a coder who is, at best, a dabbler; a hacker with a hand ax
rather than a sculptor with a fine blade -- a mere dilettante if
I may dare to put the finest luster on it.

Mmmhh, overemphasized modesty expressed in flowery language, often a
sign of the smug who think that they are actually the best thing to hit
the world since mashed potatoes.

Is it wrong to create a web page as art, less a conveyance of its
content, than content itself?

Asking a question to which you know the answer, this doesn't look good.

http://www.geocities.com/gamcclary/art.html

So you have reason for your smugness. It looks good.

Some comments on the technical aspects:

Hosting on Geocities drags any site down a level.

You've achieved the look by using many and sometimes large images, this
will make the site a nightmare to use to the vast majority of the
world's population who are still on dial up. To compound this issue most
images seem to be used on one page only, every page (I only looked at
two) looks completely different. The home page weighs in at
24768 bytes with 328597 bytes of dependencies, this is too much.

There is rarely a good reason to use inline CSS, it defeats one of the
potential advantages of CSS.

Most of the meta elements serve no useful purpose, they are hardly used
by SEs anymore.

Your "My art" title and h1 content for the home page is flawed. It
should be something like "Glenn McClary". There should be no reason to
add "My art" unless you have another personal page on the net about
other interests you have.

The message "If you have disabled JavaScript, some features of some
pages on this site will not display." is of no interest to users if JS
is used for optional fluff, it demonstrates a failure of the site if JS
is used for essential features or content. Stuff that moves on a web
page draws the user's attention to the extent that it makes it hard to
look at other content. Occasionally that may be just what you want, this
doesn't apply to the image changer you used, it's highly annoying.

Your navigation menu should be marked up for what it is, a list (of
links).

Accesskeys are considered harmful to accessibility, loose them.

There are very few good reasons to use &nbsp;, creating spacing isn't
one of them. Same goes for <br>, and what's that <br/> doing in there?

Headers should be used to structure a document, they should be
consecutive. Don't choose a heading level based on the text size you
want. There should be only one level one header on your pages.

--
Spartanicus

Spartanicus wrote:

gam <g.mcclary@yahooDOTcom> wrote:

Ah! I confess to be one engaging in the creation of (my own) html
pages, and lacking any professional skill: a plodding amateur of
a coder who is, at best, a dabbler; a hacker with a hand ax
rather than a sculptor with a fine blade -- a mere dilettante if
I may dare to put the finest luster on it.

Mmmhh, overemphasized modesty expressed in flowery language, often a
sign of the smug who think that they are actually the best thing to hit
the world since mashed potatoes.

Is it wrong to create a web page as art, less a conveyance of its
content, than content itself?

Asking a question to which you know the answer, this doesn't look good.

http://www.geocities.com/gamcclary/art.html

So you have reason for your smugness. It looks good.

Some comments on the technical aspects:

Hosting on Geocities drags any site down a level.

You've achieved the look by using many and sometimes large images, this
will make the site a nightmare to use to the vast majority of the
world's population who are still on dial up. To compound this issue most
images seem to be used on one page only, every page (I only looked at
two) looks completely different. The home page weighs in at
24768 bytes with 328597 bytes of dependencies, this is too much.

There is rarely a good reason to use inline CSS, it defeats one of the
potential advantages of CSS.

Most of the meta elements serve no useful purpose, they are hardly used
by SEs anymore.

Your "My art" title and h1 content for the home page is flawed. It
should be something like "Glenn McClary". There should be no reason to
add "My art" unless you have another personal page on the net about
other interests you have.

The message "If you have disabled JavaScript, some features of some
pages on this site will not display." is of no interest to users if JS
is used for optional fluff, it demonstrates a failure of the site if JS
is used for essential features or content. Stuff that moves on a web
page draws the user's attention to the extent that it makes it hard to
look at other content. Occasionally that may be just what you want, this
doesn't apply to the image changer you used, it's highly annoying.

Your navigation menu should be marked up for what it is, a list (of
links).

Accesskeys are considered harmful to accessibility, loose them.

There are very few good reasons to use &nbsp;, creating spacing isn't
one of them. Same goes for <br>, and what's that <br/> doing in there?

Headers should be used to structure a document, they should be
consecutive. Don't choose a heading level based on the text size you
want. There should be only one level one header on your pages.

Spartanicus
Thanks for your visit and your comments -- both I and my pages
will benefit.


gam

gam wrote:
....

But, I ramble...

You certainly do.

May I ask that you take a look? To comment on what catches your
eye, or sense of propriety?


http://www.geocities.com/gamcclary/art.html

I'm using Firefox, so results may be different for IE. I also test
with Firefox because it's got a lot of nice development extensions that
validate code and javascript and so forth. Right now, the validator
gives 63 warnings (although no errors) for your page.

The background is a bit much. The text is white, as is the background
in some spots (like where there's the "balloon" that says "Matthew
24:34"), depending on the size of the window, making the text
unreadable.

Some of the layout just doesn't look right in Firefox.

fred.haab (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

gam wrote:
...
But, I ramble...

You certainly do.

May I ask that you take a look? To comment on what catches your
eye, or sense of propriety?


http://www.geocities.com/gamcclary/art.html

I'm using Firefox, so results may be different for IE. I also test
with Firefox because it's got a lot of nice development extensions that
validate code and javascript and so forth. Right now, the validator
gives 63 warnings (although no errors) for your page.

First, Thanks for your visit.

I will certainly look into those 63 warnings... I will see what
"tidy" has to say as soon as I hit send on this...

I will also look into those 'development extensions'
W3 does not mention (the warnings) them, so I was unaware...

The background is a bit much. The text is white, as is the background
in some spots (like where there's the "balloon" that says "Matthew
24:34"),

I am only aware of one white spot. Actually, the text is #FFFCCC;
and the "white spot" averages out at about #E4E3E8; a point I
mention only because I have spent some little time working on
this very detail.

-- but yes, I am aware of that white spot, which is why there is
an empty box intended to hold the text off the balloon....
depending, of course, on the size of the window...

If the viewer does adjust the size of their view window, they
will notice that the design is flexible -- for more than one reason.

depending on the size of the window, making the text

unreadable.

Some of the layout just doesn't look right in Firefox.

Yes, understand, the layout does seem to change slightly from
MSIE, Firefox and Opera... and I can't code for all, ( I tried,
it is maddening! ) so some things may not look as good in one
browser as the others...

If you would mention the particular detail which offends you I
will see if I can compromise, or correct, for that.


Fred, I appreciate your comments

gam

fred.haab (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

gam wrote:
...
But, I ramble...

You certainly do.

May I ask that you take a look? To comment on what catches your
eye, or sense of propriety?


http://www.geocities.com/gamcclary/art.html

I'm using Firefox, so results may be different for IE. I also test
with Firefox because it's got a lot of nice development extensions that
validate code and javascript and so forth. Right now, the validator
gives 63 warnings (although no errors) for your page.

O.K., I got the validate code extension... and
have made corrections...

thanks again....

g