My Website Learning Experience

[AndreSlabber's site]... which I would rank as one of the very worst web pages I have ever seen. -- GarethMcCaughan

Would you care to elaborate on that opinion, Gareth? I can take criticism, but you have to be a little more specific than just saying you don't like it. The fact that you don't like it is irrelevant to me, but the reasons you don't like it highly interest me, being the author of the site. -- AndreSlabber

P.S. Having seen your own homepage on the Web [1], I get an idea why you don't like it: you are an 'Information Only' type of person, whereas I think that putting what you have to say into a nice suit also helps...

[See below. -- GarethMcCaughan]

I just cannot read the page. I didn't work with LynxBrowser (duh), but even NetscapeNavigator gives me troubles. The page suggests me to upgrade to a frames-compatible browser. I have a frames-compatible browser. (Netscape Communicator 4.6) Something is terribly wrong here. -- StephanHouben

Stephan, this is useful info. I did briefly test the site on Netscape before putting it on the Web, but it was mainly designed with Internet Explorer in mind. The advice to upgrade to a frames compatible browser only appears in the noframes section, so I cannot deduce anything else than that Netscape is for some reason displaying the noframes section for you. If I have time, I'll look into it. -- AndreSlabber

OK, I read the code and it turns out that if you don't have JavaScript enabled, it complains that it cannot display the page because your browser is not frames enabled. I always browse with Java, JavaScript and pictures disabled, but against my better judgement I turned it on just to view this page. It takes an eternity to load, and then... it makes my browser full-screen. Even the navigational aids are gone! This is extremely rude. Reminded me immediately why I always have JavaScript turned off.

I don't know which browser you are running, but I'm doing a simple window.maximize. On Internet Explorer, that NEVER touches the navigational aids. Now that I'm aware of the devastating effect it has on what I assume to be Netscape, I'll remove that feature.

Then there is this "advise" to upgrade to InternetExploder. Thanks, dude. I run Linux.

There is no advice, merely the mention of the possibility to do so. If you want it otherwise, it's your choice.

-- StephanHouben

You should consider being LynxFriendly. That does not mean ugly. I just recently updated http://sunir.org/sunir/writing for instance, which isn't ugly (I hope), but it is LynxFriendly. Also, you should realize how seriously bad your FeatureKarma is. Remember, you are not done editing until you are left with a blank page. Delete everything that does not contribute to the unified whole. Your page has no unifying theme which is why it is so difficult to use (is it even usable?). Finally, don't spooge the hypermedia into an old medium (is that an etch-a-sketch?). Scrolling text is evil as well as your "More..." button. Examine how other people have solved interface issues in hypermedia. http://kuro5hin.org has an excellent interface and it is extremely powerful. -- SunirShah

Sunir, I find a lot of honest comments in the above, so I'll react to that: I've never even heard of the LynxBrowser until today. I gather it is one of the browsers that about 3% of the population uses. (79% IE, 18% Netscape, 3% other, as can be found at http://www.mcfedries.com/books/cightml/) I will look into this, but if your site is any indication, there is not much that one can do without being LynxUnfriendly?. Other than that, you've done a great job on your site.

As for the empty page stuff, I have my doubts: if so, wouldn't it be better to just not write anything altogether? At least we'd be finished sooner.

: You are missing the point. There is tension between adding more and more and simplifying to the most minimal. Deleting is the BalancingForce to bloat.

OK, OK, I may have gone a bit overboard there. But I do not believe that everything should be reduced to its most minimal form. Perhaps I'm too old-fashioned to see things like that.

The unifying theme of the site is there, it just may not be all that obvious to you: It is about the things that keep me busy in daily life, as is clearly said in the introduction.

Also, the idea of this site was not to build the perfect interface, because if you call kuro5hin the perfect interface, I see no difference with any business site on the Web. The idea here was to create a simulation of a piece of hardware on a website. I think I at least succeeded in that.

: k5 isn't the perfect interface. It is merely an excellent interface. Indeed, it is excellent because it is so simple and intuitive. Also, I have already mentioned earlier about how using RealWorld interfaces in software is bogus. See http://www.iarchitect.com. They really hate QuickTime.

No matter what you make, there will always be someone that hates it. I never said it was a good idea to do a realworld interface, I just wanted to do it once. Actually, you could easily replace all this with just a few frames and some small sets of buttons, but then it'd look like any website you find out there. Don't you ever do something just because you think it's fun, or just because you want to prove to yourself you can do it?

: In this case, you have set yourself up as a counterexample to the IhateFramesClub, whether you had that intention or not. So, unfortunately, you don't have the luxury of claiming you were doing it just for yourself any longer. Unless you'd like to explicitly state that your page is not a good example of frames (or maybe remove your page from the list and merely add yourself). Then we can delete all of this. -- ss

You may think it resembles an Etch-a-Sketch, but I live in the Netherlands, and have never seen a real live one. But you are right, it does look a bit like what I've seen of them ;-)

I am also not entirely fond of the More... button, but have as yet to find a nice alternative. -- AndreSlabber

: Consider that you waste a lot of space on frobs like the border of the display. Try removing that first.

If I do, then it wouldn't be the Internet Viewer any more. It would just be my homepage, which in itself is quite useless. Because let's be honest, which one of you is in the least bit interested in the fact that I think the Matrix is a great movie?

Since Andre asked me to elaborate on why I don't like his page, I'd better do so. Most of what I'm about to say has already been said by others. Andre, I'm hoping you really meant it about being able to cope with criticism... :-)

That should become obvious by my reaction to this elaboration...

: GarethMcCaughan's replies-to-replies are indented like this in what follows. Gosh, I hate ThreadMode. :-)

The following describes how the page is for me. I'm using Netscape 4.61 on NT4 at the moment.

OK, I briefly tested it with Netscape 4.08, but obviously not good enough. I just looked at it through Netscape again, and I cannot figure out how I missed all this: Selfaware's Internet Viewer through Netscape REALLY sucks!

: Yep. :-) This is partly because Netscape's implementation of JavaScript consists entirely of bugs.

The page doesn't work at all without JavaScript enabled. And when it fails to work, it doesn't say "You need JavaScript", it says "You need frames".

That is because the frameset is dynamically created using JavaScript, because I wanted it to be able to be called with parameters. I just didn't realize that no JavaScript also meant that the noframes section would be displayed. Other than that, if you're programming C++ don't you also have to use tools that can handle C++? I think the same goes for JavaScript

: Certainly, but although you may be "programming JavaScript", I certainly am not. Neither are most people reading web pages. So you should make as few assumptions as possible about what they're using. Of course, there's always the "80% are using IE, so I'll just target IE" approach, but that always seems rather unsatisfactory to me.

It automatically maximizes itself. Choosing how much of my screen a browser window takes up is my job, not yours. I bought an expensive monitor so that I could have lots of things on the screen at once, and I consider 1600x1200 pixels more than any web page deserves.

Wouldn't I just love to have a screen like that. And you're right, 1600x1200 is too much for my site. As for the maximizing code, that is history before I go to bed tonight.

: It still seems to be there now (about 10:30am GMT on 2000-10-12). Did something go wrong? ... Oh, I see that you've answered this question below.

There are two different things that "maximize" can mean (increase the size; tell Windows to make the window occupy the entire screen and ignore its nominal size). It does the former, which means I can't undo it by clicking on the "maximize/don't maximize" button on the titlebar; I have to drag the edges. This is fiddly when the window occupies the whole screen.

True again, I only noticed it after I put it in. Like I said, gone tomorrow.

And, of course, the auto-maximize happens any time I arrive at the page. This is pretty much inevitable, I suppose, but annoying: I just went to "About Communicator" to check what version I was using, then "Back" ... and, bang!, the window maximized itself again.

At a civilised size, the actual content occupies less than half the area of the window. Maybe you don't value your screen real estate, but I value mine. I don't want half of it or more taken up with decoration.

Aren't you overdoing it a bit? Or is your preferred window size 640x480? And are buttons considered decoration nowadays? OK, there is more on the screen than just a page showing some text. But most of it has a function.

: My browser windows on this machine are about 640x640 pixels. It would be narrower, if it weren't for the fact that some things I spend a fair amount of time on (Wiki is one) involve using editable text areas, and those are painful if they're too small. On my box at home my browser windows are about 500 pixels wide. See TenWordLine for some insight into why I prefer narrower browser windows (apart from the fact that the narrower they are the more I can have visible at once).

You have a bunch of big chunky buttons. When I have the window at a sensible size, most of them are invisible and one of them is cut off halfway. I cannot get at the other buttons without making the window absurdly wide. Various other things are also truncated when the window is a sensible size. There's no indication of this fact on the screen.

OK, I did not go out of my way to make everything accessible if the user makes the window considerably smaller than the size it was designed for. If I had, the whole thing would have been cut up by scrollbars popping up left and right to make you reach all edges. There would have been little or nothing left of the effect I was trying to achieve. You may not like the effect in the first place, but that's another story.

: Surely scrollbars only appear when there isn't enough space to display everything? If there's really no way to make it show no scrollbars on a window of the size you wanted, but scrollbars when necessary on narrower windows, then that's a pity.

The cute scrolling text at the bottom right (when the window is a sensible size) or at the bottom in the middle (when it's the size you apparently want) sometimes gets messed up in various ways. Firstly, unless the window is too wide the text doesn't fit in the window. (It's truncated at the right-hand side, and there are no scroll bars or anything to let me get at the stuff that's fallen off the edge.) Secondly, sometimes the scrolling doesn't work and I get a rather pretty but unhelpful mess of smeared-out characters in that portion of the window. This is probably Netscape's fault...

At least now I have an inkling of what you call 'sensible size'. I guess my first guess of 640x480 wasn't all that bad... As for the text not fitting the window, that is probably the fault of the JavaScript code I used for it. It does not automatically resize the scroller if its window resizes. The other problem is probably Netscape's fault, because I've never seen that on IE.

I don't want a hardware device simulated in my browser windows. Your page says "I thought it might be fun to have a device like this in the window of your browser". Perhaps it's fun for you, but it's not fun for me.

OK, it was wrong of me to state it like that. It should have said ...my browser...

It says "You may have already noticed that right-clicking on my site doesn't do what you want it to do". Actually, for me it often does; presumably it doesn't for those lucky lucky people who are using InternetExploiter?. Be that as it may, this attitude really annoys me. It says "What I've done is so clever that I don't mind messing up your browsing experience in sundry ways to make it a little harder for you to find out how I did it". It's not as if this actually makes it impossible, anyway.

If you had read any further, you would have seen that I do not do it because I do not want you to know, but rather because I like to interact with people about the stuff I do. It is merely trying to get you to E-mail me if you want to know how I've done it.

: Actually, I did read further, and I plead guilty to tendentious phrasing. I should have said "to find out how I did it without asking me".

(I actually feel rather guilty about mentioning that your right-click-interference hack doesn't work right on my Netscape, because I expect you intend it to and this may provoke you to fix it, thus making the page that little bit worse.)

No, I actually do listen to people.... the no-right-click stuff will be gone. If not tonight, then probably tomorrow night.

Note that the no-right-click thing doesn't just make it harder for people to read your source. My preferred way of doing the "back" operation goes via the right-click menu and, guess what?, your hack prevents that. By default I have the toolbar containing the "back" icon hidden on Netscape, because it takes up a lot of space and I don't need it. Congratulations: your hack has made one of the commonest operations done while web-browsing take ten times longer for me.

I myself have never used back through the rightclick menu (I don't think IE even supports it). But you are right: this is annoying.

Following links to other sites makes them appear inside your little viewer frame. Please consider that other people may not want to be trapped inside your "Internet Viewer". Yes, I know, you can do "open in new window". You're still gratuitously putting trouble in the user's way. Consider, incidentally, what happens if some other site someone gets to in this way also uses frames. Result: the area of screen actually containing useful stuff is about the size of a postage stamp.

By now the list of things to do has grown so large, that the best thing to do is probably to abandon the whole thing, and write a 'normal' website again. I'll have to think this over though, because the content in itself should then be all that much more important. This time it was presentation that counted. But again, at your 'desired size' you are probably right. At my preferred size I find it workable.

: Perhaps you could have two versions: one with the "Internet Viewer" interface and one that focuses more on content. (Generate both sets of pages from a single bunch of sources.) Then see which one gets used more. Actually, that probably won't tell you anything: whichever one is linked to from the rest of the world will get used more.

The front page has, under "Welcome to my Internet Viewer", four things that clearly ought to be links, labelled "Go Back", "Go Home", "What is this?" and "Contact me". They aren't actually links. Is this some kind of sadism?

No, this is Netscape totally not comprehending the attempt to create a custom right-click menu. Obviously doesn't work...

: Oh, I see. Netscape is broken again. Film at 11.

The whole thing really seems to have been designed to make the browsing experience as troublesome as possible. I presume that wasn't really your intention, but it's what you've managed to achieve. This isn't a matter of me being an "information only" person, although I do believe that content is the most important thing on a web site (this seems to be a heretical view, these days); it's a matter of having my browser set up in a way that's convenient for me and not liking it when someone else decides that they know better than I do how my browser should work.

A very nice conclusion to an honest rant. As you may have gathered by now, this site was not about super-content: anything you can find here you can find in several thousand other places, so what would be the point of doing it in the first place? Mainly it was about me learning to get along with JavaScript, and if anything, it tought me that there is NO standard JavaScript. Secondly, it was an attempt at creating something that you don't find in thousands of other sites. I may have gone a bit overboard on that, but that's what I usually do when something catches my eye.

: As I said, Netscape's JavaScript implementation consists entirely of bugs. Life may be better when the Mozilla project finally delivers something usable. As for "not about super-content", my attitude has always been that a web page that really doesn't have anything new to offer in its content isn't worth either writing or reading. I don't think your pages are as content-poor as you make out, though.

End of rant. :-)

--GarethMcCaughan

''Points well taken. Small addition the morning after: Yesterday I worked like a horse trying to get all the changes in, and when I tested it last night most of it seemed to work. This morning at work I noticed that hardly anything worked, making me doubt my sanity and the correct functioning of several programs: FTP Explorer for one (didn't it transfer my files to the server, but say that it did?), Internet Exploiter (does it show me what is on the server, or just what it remembers it loaded last time?). Sorry about the changes, I'll try to get them in tonight.

'I did get them in, so everything I promised would change has been changed (I think, editing over a 100 files its hard to keep track of things). If you find anything not correct, please let me know. -- AndreSlabber'

: I must congratulate you on your graceful response to some pretty heavy-handed criticism. (This would apply even if you hadn't made any changes...) I should probably be more polite next time I do this. :-)

I don't know which browser you are running

Exactly.

And Precisely. Go see http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ .

Coming up with impressive looking interfaces is fine if you want a learning experience, but there are far more interesting problems to solve. The best web designed sites I've been to are the ones that separate the user interface from the content, allowing the user interface to be chosen and customized by the user. A fair example of this is found in site creation tools like MicrosoftFrontPage (which uses "themes" to encode various formatting features at design time), and ManilaByDaveWiner (which also has "themes" but which are applied at run-time).

Wiki also allows this sort of experimentation with user interfaces since the content and the presentation are separate. In my experimental Wiki, I thought it would be interesting to present each page to have this general form:

 +-------------------------------+
 | Page title                    |
 +-------------------------------+
 | Back  | Rendered page content |
 | links |                       |
 |       |                       |
 +-------------------------------+
 | Page metainformation (date,   |
 | time of last edit, revision)  |
 | Edit link                     |
 +-------------------------------+

This was pretty cool and useful (except when the page had many backlinks), and it led to lots more experimentation. The point here is that if your underlying web site's data is in a format that is separated from presentation, you can freely experiment with user interfaces all you want. -- JohnPassaniti