HTML Heaven

This page was created in answer to Eric S. Raymond's HTML Hell page. Eric proclaims that "Hell is other websmiths," meaning, I suppose, that he has set standards for the rest of us. Some people may believe the web is for everybody and that diversity rules. Nope. This is how it should be:

• No animation. He lists the "blink" tag, animated gifs, the "marquee" tag and flash. All offenders.
• No "garish" backgrounds. This is followed by complaints about unreadable text/background combinations. I agree that text must be readable and fancy backgrounds can hinder that readability. But it doesn't have to be that way.
• No graphics if they add any time to pages loading. To this, he adds a whole special paragraph about "brushscript headings" in gifs. I agree, page loadup time should be kept at a minimum. I've always been one of the biggest offenders in this. However, it's a trade-off. If you want to give your visitor a certain experience, sometimes you have to use content that requires a bit of patience on the part of the visitor. Of course, he doesn't have to wait. But I appreciate if he does. And today, everyone's getting DSL and cable so download time will hopefully become a non-issue soon, with the exception of a few holdouts like Eric.
• No "best viewed with" or "resize your browser to ... instructions." I agree here. The webmaster has a duty to make a site compatible with recent versions of both the main browsers. Mind you, I said recent versions and main browsers. If you can't see my image map on your lynx browser, sorry. I'm writing for today's web. Let's move on. NOTE: I just discovered that Eric's homepage contains the following instructions: "If you see broken images, get a browser that can view PNGs. This is a GIF-free site. Now that Unisys is shaking down websites that use GIFs for a $5000 license fee, you should burn all your GIFs too." Doesn't that violate his rule? Or can he alone tell us what browser to use?
• No large fixed-sized tables. Agreed. Make them small or relative sized.
• No small fonts. This one condemns a large portion of the web. You do have a place to set size preferences for viewing fonts, folks.
• No scrolling text on the status line. Eeek! It moves. And it keeps you from seeing where those links will take you when you hold your cursor over them.
• No "unnecessary" use of Java. Which must mean all use of Java since it's never necessary, is it?
• No "pop-up windows." By this he doesn't mean those annoying advertising abominations that pop out at you when you're trying to load a page. He means a link opening a new window in which to display a new page, thereby enabling you to stay on the present web site while viewing another. Sorry. I do this and I'm not really sorry at all. It has it's advantages.
• No background MIDIs. They take too long to load. What kind of modem does this guy have?
• No hit counters. Eric doesn't care how many hits you got.
• No guestbooks. If Eric wants to tell you something, he'll send you email.
• No absence of email link. How else can Eric tell you what's wrong with your site? He won't use the guestbook.
• No "pointless vanity pages. In other words, Eric doesn't care about your dog so don't you dare put a picture of him on your web site.
• No "angst and pretentiousness." This is for "losers."
• No "corporate logorrhea." It takes them "a million or three years for it to finish" loading on his browser.
• No frames. They "suck." He will now "grudgingly concede that borderless frames have their uses" but do it right, damnit!
• No booboos. I will agree with him there. He lists booboos as: "stale links," "broken HTML," and "unstable extensions." To that list, I would add no broken images either.

What does Eric like? He has "three words. Content, content and content." By content, he seems to mean text. A page whose primary purpose is a beautiful display or cool multimedia would go in the "abomination" category. HTML Hell does not seem to have been updated since it was first created. The web has changed a lot in the past few years but what constitutes good web construction does not seem to have changed at all according to this guru of the status quo. Don't get me wrong. I respect Eric's esthetics and his right to create his form of minimalist, no frills web site with it's preference for language over image, sound and motion. But I don't agree with his trying to set the standards for everybody. Let's celebrate the diversity of the web. It is, after all, world wide.

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