We really don't know that much about elegant code but we like the idea of conserving Internet bandwidth and we all hate pages that take forever to load.
New programs like MS publisher 97 that try to generate HTML code and Gif graphics from whatever you throw at it are rather amazing but we can expect to see a lot more Gifs, poorly controlled frames and not very good source code.
If you want to see what we mean and have a few seconds, take a look at this incipient edition of the humus dot com home page. Warning: this early attempt at a home page which we will call the "slow demo" was generated from Microsoft Publisher 97 and will probably cause browsers older than Netscape 2.0 and Internet Explorer 3 to give a general protection fault and crash! The problem appears to be related to the large number of frames that are generated by MS Publisher in trying to make a page without resorting to making one big GIF image. The older browsers just can't handle it. So if you have a newer browser and have gotten this far take a look at the slow demo and also take the time to look at the lengthy source code of the slow demo as Publisher 97 tries to describe and locate all the frames.
The "slow demo" file actually looks similar to the current humus home page but probably takes longer to download as it contains 6 gif images instead of 2 . While the total number of bytes is nearly the same as the current page we feel the amount of information and usability is not as good.
After looking at the source code experienced HTML programmers will not consider the current version of the humus home page very elegant, but it should download faster, the visual effect is nearly the same and we hope no one with an older browser still finds it causes them to crash.
We have started using the Claris home page software for editing most of our pages and find that it does a nice job of handling wall paper, tables, and frames and tries real hard to give you a WYSIWYG view of the page. Take a look at this screen capture from the Claris home page display of the "slow demo". It illustrates some of the many frames that Publisher 97 created in generating the page. We find that Publisher does this on relatively simple documents and is not really a very good Web page editor although it is useful for generating custom GIF image files.
Claris offers an evaluation copy of their software at ftp.claris.com /pub/USA-Windows/Trial_Software/
Download the file CHPDEMO.EXE There is also a Mac trial version in another directory.
Originally we found that merely opening the "slow demo" in Claris Home page and then without making any changes, saving it as a Claris home page HTML file caused the file size to balloon about 1/3 because the source code got longer. Miraculously though the file no longer caused older browsers to crash.
Running both versions through an HTML validator service such as weblint at http://imageware.com/RxHTML.cgi did not generate too many code error messages but The Kinder Gentler HTML validator http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~gerald/validate generated more errors than you can shake a stick at on both files.
If we stepped on any toes during this
discussion-Sorry about that : -)
For generating nice simple clean HTML code for a
text display like this one we still find it's still hard to beat
Microsoft's free add on HTML wizard for Word. It is available at
Microsoft's web site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/internet/
We also like what Microsoft has done in providing free HTML
converters for all their Office products and look forward to
evaluating the HTML creation features in Office 97.
For some serious discussion on conserving Internet bandwidth follow
this link to the Internet Bandwidth Conservation Society. They also
offer a large amount of java script source code.
http:\\www.infohiway.com/faster
If you like to add to this discussion email to
webmaster@humus.com
or
Return to the current humus home page
