Re: Web Design

At 05:13 PM 11/29/98 -0600, you wrote:
>At 08:43 PM 11/29/98 Sunday, David Meadows said:
>>To create web pages, your most important skills are how to write, 
>how to
>>create graphics, how to lay-out pages, how to structure hypertext, 
>or some
>>combination thereof. The rest of it is unimportant.
>
>I'll leave the concept of maintaining those web pages for others
>who've had experience in taking over sites created with wysiwyg
>editors. :-)
>
>I'll just say that it is indeed possible to create *static* pages with
>the skills you mention, and there are some good looking pages out
>there. At least, they look good in IE and/or Netscape. :-)
>
>But if you want a page that *does* anything - like send the formated
>contents of a form, check for browser compatibility, create dynamic
>pages based on some sort of data or user choice - then you darn
>well better know how to code. I know there are programs out there
>that will write simple javascript and I've seen what happens to the
>authors of those pages when something goes wrong. A ten-minute
>troubleshoot turns into an all-day nightmare.
>
>So it's a choice. Great layout design takes some artistry and (we
>certainly hope!) a good knowledge of the english language. You can 
>stop there if you want and blindly trust the tools you've chosen.
>
>Dynamic pages - the really cool ones - take a fair amount of 
>technical skill, plus the other stuff.

But, I daresay, the current hodgepodge of CS or SS JavaScript,
cum Java, cum ASP or Livewire, may be in vogue but is hardly
the best _technical_ means of slicing and dicing.  

I argue, often and quietly, that HTML 3 is about where one
should aim, and the rest should be a combination of smart
database design and a CGI-level interface to it, with mix-and-
match pieces of pages kept in the database.

But, oh, hell, I'm not with it.

>
>

-- Jan Theodore Galkowski,
   Database and Web Programmer-Analyst,
   jtgalkowski(at)alum.mit.edu,
   http://home.att.net/~jtgalkowski/algebraist.htm

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