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Friday,
March 5, 1999 I'm back home. Still have a stopped up head, and air travel
doesn't help that much. Column is due Monday so this weekend will be a lot of work. Spent
much of today at Microsoft campus, with the Office 2000 Developers Tools people, Windows
CE, and Front Page 2000 product managers. Whatever people believe about Microsoft, the
line troops are trying to do their best, and appreciate constructive observations. I found
several things I wanted improved in Front Page, and at least a couple of those notions
will be incorporated into the 2000 edition. Front Page 2000 is impressive, or at least I
found it so, and the development tools for Office are going to make applications
development a LOT easier; one suspects that VBA will be the tool of choice for a lot of
business applications.
Integration of Office components continues, with Publisher and Front Page and Outlook
all working together in the newest editions.
There are a number of CE serious rivals to Palm Pilot, and I was surprised at how good
the handwriting recognition was in one of them until I realized this was Paragraph,
developed by Dr. Stepan Panovich, whom I met in Moscow in 1989; at the time they took a
sample of my handwriting, sloppy as it is, both print and cursive, to use as one of the
tools to work toward for recognition, so I suppose I shouldn't be too astonished that when
I scribbled on that pad it actually recognized it. You can put Graffiti into the system
too, but frankly if it will recognize my writing...
Over at
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000001.html
there's a long discussion of whether this web site sucks. This is the second such time
I have been so honored. I tried to read his reasons for hating this place, but I didn't
find the writing that interesting. That may be prejudice, of course, but he doesn't seem
to have any notion of what I am trying to do, and my guess is there's a tad bit of
jealousy in there somewhere. In any event, he's absolutely right, I could get any number
of professional web people to design and maintain this place, but that is not what I have
set out to do.
And I continue to wonder, what is so horrible here? It appears to be readable, and
while navigation is a bit of a problem that is improving as time goes on. You can read the
text, and most of this IS text. I try to keep the pages short enough to have fast
downloads, and I have been pretty scrupulous about following reader suggestions when that
was feasible. I certainly don't have a lot of whizbangs, but I don't want them. I don't
have that standard layout of a narrow strip of text framed on each side by solid sheets of
color. And I think this is more readable than the "pages that suck" web site,
which doesn't appear to me to have all that many desirable features, or have I lost
something? I confess considerable curiousity here.
One of the criticisms"
This page is, I have to say, pretty bad. Mr. Pournelle should know
better than to TYPE IN CAPITALS, telling us to CLICK ON THE BLIMP TO EMAIL him. There's no
title graphic. He mixes font colors. Many elements of this page could be changed for the
better.
Of course I put in the click on the blimp to email precisely because I was told that
some people didn't figure that out. I will confess the silly blimp is an affectation, and
not needed, but I like it, and I don't see any point in changing it. Another critcism is
use of Times Roman. Instead of Verdana, or Arial, both recommended as "cleaner." Of course it would not
be difficult to use either of those, but I don't find san serif fonts all that more
attractive than Times Roman, and Lord knows there have been enough studies about
readability of fonts, with variations of Times Roman winning out.
I suppose my poor home page really isn't very pretty, but it was never intended to be
anything other than a way in. I suppose I ought to have a contest. What would be a great
home page for this place that doesn't suck? It shouldn't take long to download,
though, and it ought to have at least some indication of what the place IS. This is
certainly not a place for people who are interested in pretty web pages. There are plenty
of those around. It's mostly content, and if you're not interested in content there's no
point in being here; buy why should that earn me so much vituperation?
Darnell keeps telling me my site sucks, too, but somehow people keep coming back. Maybe
the new www.byte.com site will take care of all that,
and be pretty, and people can spend their time there if they hate this place. But I
confess confusion: what in the world have I done here that is so horrible as to warrant
all that discussion? And what is there about the site that tells me mine is awful that is
so good?
I can't find out by mail, because if there is an email address for the site I can't
find it; and you have to register to send him any comments. I don't have any desire to be
registered there, and I have no idea of what he will do with my address once he has it, so
I am not likely to be able to ask what he is doing, or why he is so well qualified. I do
know that it takes a LONG time to download his page, but whether that is design or a slow
server I do not know. It's pretty clear you have to want mightily to see his page since
you must wait so long for it. As for me, I guess I'll just have to suffer.
I have found -- it is not obvious -- that the sucks page has ways to
letting you know who the people are who are posting these messages. Here is one:
Looking at this site from a design perspective was painful. Poor
alignment, poor use of colors and that boring font! It made me totally uninterested in the
content.
It was from:
Current Email: susanrm@hotmail.com
Homepage: http://members.aol.com/suzzyq5150
Occupation: Instructional designer
Location: Bartlett IL USA
Interests: web design, parenting, working out
who clearly judges books by their covers, and then some. Ah well. I have sent her an
inquiry as to what she thinks people should be doing with web sites and why all must do it
in the same way. We will see if I get a reply. Looking at her web page, I would say she
wants to convey a lot of information about her family, which will largely be of interest
to people who know her; they seem charming enough, but there is no hint of intellectual
content, and the last update was early February. Her favorite web places include a soap
opera site and several on parenting data; admirable, and surely of interest to many, but I
would not have thought that automatically makes my site something to be described
vulgarly.
At least she HAS a web site. Many of those seem to have none. Some don't even seem to
have email addresses. All are certain they can do better than me, but I haven't found one
trying to convey any actual information: the "Susan" one above is one of the
best of the lot. In fact, had I earlier cottoned on to the little buttons that let you see
who these people are, I would not have spent so much time paying attention to this. Ah.
Well. I will know better in future. And I still have found no way to send an email to the
gentleman who maintains the sites that suck site.
But perhaps we should have a contest to design me a better home page?
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