Week of May 7, 2001 - Scenic Route

A few weeks ago I referred to this first topic as “Project B”. It's something I've been working on since the beginning of March when I was taking the technical writing workshop at Writers & Books. I got to class early one afternoon and the instructor seemed particularly glad to see me.

This made me a bit nervous because usually when people are talking about me, it isn't good. And she was alone in the room so I wasn't quite sure who the rest of the “we” were, or even if they were.

“Uh, was it good or bad?” I asked, looking around the room. “And who is it you were talking with?”

“I was just in Joe's office [Joe Flaherty, Executive Director of Writers & Books]. He's recently discovered blogs and online journals, so naturally your name came up.”

“He was saying how fascinated he is with them and how he wished we could offer a course on how to set them up. I told him one of my students would be perfect for it. Why don't you go in and talk with him about it before class starts.”

I introduced myself and we talked for a bit about the subject, my background with it and so on. He was getting ready to leave for the day and seemed distracted. He told me though, that he wasn't sure how to fit such a workshop into the curriculum. He said he thought it was a better fit with Lit Lab, the new electronic course offerings. He was going to think the whole thing over before making any decisions so we didn't get into anything in depth.

He walked by me a couple of weeks later as I was waiting for the Creative Nonfiction class to start. I worked up my nerve and when he came back I stopped him.

“I was wondering if you've given any more thought to the blogging and online journaling class.”

“I have,” he said. “It's too late, of course, to get it into the spring catalog so we have some time. Why don't you get together with Tim [T. Lucien Wright, novelist and Director of Adult Education] and see about putting something together for the summer or autumn.”

Tim told me to put together a course description and outline. “But I won't be able to do anything with it until after the spring workshops begin. Get back to me then.”

I got back to him last Thursday when I was registering for a one-day workshop two weeks from now.

He leaned back in his chair and said, “Tell me again how you would run a workshop like this.”

I gave him a thumbnail sketch and we looked at a few pages from the site. As fate would have it, the first entry he read was the one from March 14 about shitty first drafts.

Although I'd been working towards it and planning for it since March, I was astonished when he put the acceptance that way.

“What I need you to do,” he continued, “is to cut down the description and rework your outline for a four week workshop. I like to start first-time instructors with only four weeks and in the summer session.”

The shortened description and outline, in Word format, is here. I'd like to have some peer-review, and reader comments are welcome too. What I need to know is if the description sounds appealing and if I've missed anything in the outline. And if you were to drop a note to Tim or Joe it might be a help too.

I know it sounds like a lot of ground to cover in four two-hour sessions, but most of it goes quickly. And the emphasis is going to be on blog type journals, which are inherently easier to set up and maintain than the traditional variety like mine. Finally, between sessions there's plenty of room for discussion on the blog we'll set up for the class. (Which explains, Noah, why I downloaded Greymatter a couple of weeks ago.)

So I'm at least a minor, local authority on online journals. Enough so that the local literary center thinks I can do a gloss-over-the-surface workshop this summer.

The second topic where I've been elevated to authority status came out of the blue today. I was checking the site logs for Project A. One thing I like to do is repeat the searches people used to find the site.

It seemed strange that a Google search would direct someone to the About the Site page for Project A. Then I looked at the search terms, “background attribute Netscape 4.75 html”. I can see where Google might think it's a relevant page. When I repeated the search, I was flabbergasted to find it was number one!

It ties in with the new crusade I alluded to at the end of the April 29 entry. And since Google thinks I'm an authority on the subject, I'd better start acting like one.

Several things have come together for me in the past several weeks. During the course of developing the site for Project A, I decided that I'd better become a bit more professional in the way I go about writing HTML. Then I downloaded version five of Opera and discovered the wonderful world of HTML validation.

I decided right then that I'd validate all the code for Project A. It all validates except for a single form and the JavaScript for the HitTraker.net site tracking. It's the first time I've done a form and it's code I scarfed from somewhere, thinking I'd learn how it works after the fact. Now's the time.

The HitTracker code is what they sent me. I've gotten rid of all the errors but two, and it breaks HitTracker when I fix those errors. I'm thinking about dropping the service anyway since it makes it too easy for me to obsess over the logs.

As Project A wore on, I became increasingly frustrated by pages that validated, looked great in IE 5.5, Netscape 6 and Opera 5, but looked like shit in Netscape 4.x. I needed to know more about how CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are implemented in the different browsers.

What I found was that in the rush to get version four out the door and to compete with IE3, the folks at Netscape didn't fully implement CSS, figuring they'd fix it later. Of course, Netscape, the company, went to hell in a hand basket shortly thereafter. Later is now four years and web designers have had to deal with the problems ever since.

Meanwhile, the Mozilla team, Microsoft and the folks at Opera have had to create browsers that follow the standards as they exist today, accommodate millions of old web pages written using tags that are no longer part of the standard and deal with poorly written HTML from people who just didn't know any better. (Until recently, I included myself in the latter category. Now of course, Google thinks I'm an authority.)

That's what's largely responsible for browser bloat. People would whine that old or poorly written code didn't render properly in their browser. In order to solve a problem that they didn't cause, the browser programmers had to incorporate everything but the kitchen sink. Otherwise, they were accused of delivering buggy browsers, when in fact; it was the web pages themselves that were buggy.

As a result, Netscape went from 4MB in version three to over 25MB in last year's Netscape 6. Internet Explorer has always been a bit overweight. IE3 was 9MB. The IE6 beta I downloaded a couple of weeks ago is nearly 30MB. Remember when AOL fit on a single floppy and they mailed dozens of them everyone on the planet? If you don't have DSL or a cable modem, take a vacation while you download AOL6. It tips the scales at a whopping 45MB.

I took a bit of a rest after the new Project A site was launched. Then, the week before last, I resumed my education in properly written HTML and the use of Cascading Style Sheets. It was during the course of that research that I stumbled on a site by webstandards.org promoting their Browser Upgrade Initiative.

The goal of the Initiative is break the cycle of poorly written HTML requiring increasingly bloated browsers and ordinary users becoming reluctant to download the behemoths, which perpetuates the problems of web designers having to write poor code to accommodate old browsers.

What's needed is a three-pronged approach. First, web designers need to forsake writing code that's compatible with four-year-old browsers.

Second, users need to upgrade to browsers that support current web standards so that web designers have the incentive to write standards compliant HTML.

Third, the browser manufacturers need to bite the bullet and create browsers that are strictly standards compliant and don't make allowances for old and poorly written pages. This provides further incentive to web designers to clean up our acts which then reduces browser bloat which makes more people likely to upgrade.

That goal is a few years away, but we need to start somewhere. There's no reason why that somewhere shouldn't be right now. That explains why visitors to this site who use version four and older browsers have been greeted with the following message since last week. I've intentionally unhidden it here so that readers with contemporary browsers can see what all the fuss is about.

Fair Warning - May 1, 2001
Scenic Route Joins the
Browser Upgrade Initiative

Scenic Route already looks much better in a contemporary web browser that supports current web standards. ~~Since you can see this text, you’re not using a standards compliant web browser because I’ve made this entire text box invisible to standards compliant browsers.~~

In the next few months Scenic Route will be redesigned to strict compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium’s XHTML 1.1, CSS 1 and CSS 2 standards. That means I won’t be doing non-standards compliant things to accommodate old browsers like the one you’re using now. You’ll still be able to access and read the site. It simply won’t render properly and will probably look very plain and drab in your older browser.

The goal is not to alienate visitors who remain enamored of their favorite old browser. The goal is to become accessible to even more visitors. After the redesign, Scenic Route will also work just fine on newer devices like the Palm Pilot, cell phones with built-in web browsers and speaking browsers for the visually impaired.

In plain English, Scenic Route will be designed specifically for Opera 5, Internet Explorer 5 & 6 and Netscape 6. While they each have their quirks, all three of these browsers are sufficiently web standards compliant that every web site you visit will look and work exactly the way its designers intended.

If you haven’t upgraded to a contemporary browser because they take hours to download at typical phone-modem speeds, I’ll even help you out. Send an e-mail to giving me your name and postal address. I’ll send you a CD-ROM with the current shipping versions of Netscape 6, Opera 5 and Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. (Hey, it’s an equal opportunity web site!)

But wait! There’s more! I’ll also throw in the complete contents of brucew.com so you can peruse the archives off-line. And I’ll ferret out some other huge updates you might have missed.

For more information about web standards compliant browsers, visit the Browser Upgrade Initiative at http://www.webstandards.org/upgrade

XHTML 1.0 became the W3C's recommendation a year ago. XHTML 1.1 will become the recommendation within the next few days. I'm making the commitment to redesigning my site so that the code validates to “XHTML 1.1 Strict” compliance and uses validated CSS1 and CSS2.

I will make allowances only for the quirks in IE5 and higher, Netscape 6 and Opera 5. If the resulting site looks shitty under IE3, IE4, Netscape 3 or Netscape 4, well, thems the breaks. I'll have this done no later than the end of the calendar year although I'd like to have it done by the end of summer.

Further, I understand and sympathize with visitors who connect to the Internet with a traditional phone modem. I certainly wouldn't want sit around for hours downloading a contemporary browser. So if you use dial-up access to the Internet, I'll send you a CD with a selection of browsers, free for the asking.

Finally, I encourage my peer web journalers to join me in getting our code right and validating to at least HTML 4.01 Transitional and CSS1, (which became standards in 1998, by the way.) I'll do whatever I can help you do it. I can share the resources I've found for learning. I can share what I'm learning and I'll give as much help as I can when it comes to debugging a new layout. I suppose I should set up a section here devoted to the topic so we don't bore our readers with it.

As I said, since Google thinks I'm an authority on the subject, I'd better start acting like one.