By William Paul Fiefer
(home)
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You must recapitulate the experience of those you wish
to understand.
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The William Paul Fiefer |
"What you know about computing, other people will learn.
Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in
your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is
intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when
you were first led up to it, that you can make it more."
Alan J. Perlis |
Need more information before contacting me? (If you prefer a
distillation of this page, get my résumé.)
Here are a few unrelated questions.
I'm an editor, systems analyst, and former journalist. Since 1992, I've worked with Internet-delivered information as a writer, programmer, and humble consultant. I think the Web is a great medium populated by poor pages. These displays don't have to look like gaudy neon-lit strips but they do. Blinking banners, buttons, and animation obscure them, and frames shrink their content by a third. What started as an ample viewing area falls to a few active square-inches leaving minor territories to squint over. Hard-won information has lost the battle for screen time. Webs cost good money and you should know delivering information is harder than delivering glitz. You want to tell your audience something. What you say shouldn't compete with clutter unless your money, your time, and what you say aren't important. My core message is that doing the Web right involves focusing on content, not programming, and editors, not technicians, are the key to building quality Webs. Web content is information conveyed by technology. Good content, which makes business sense of browsing, starts with clearly shaped information, not a collection of software doodads. I think the best sites let people work and browse without distinguishing between the two. Well-organized links create a rich information context: sequential links speed searches for specific data; non-sequential links support fluid, creative work. Using sequential links ties information to its context, satisfying searchers. Loose links work oppositely, rewarding insight workers and forcing searchers to meander. But people are never exclusively one of these styles. So skip the flash, reward everybody, and let choice and information contribute to greater productivity. Emphasize clarity. Load up on content. Let users target their searches. Or wander. Or interleave the two. Leave your options open: style and structure your Web, making it a clear, navigable, flexible tool.
If you are creating a new site or enhancing an existing one, I'll do the analysis and design. If you have an existing site, I'll tune its editorial content and interactive features. I'll treat your Web like the publication and application it is, and examine its message and structure. You should bake the cake before you frost it, but if you didn't, I'll give you a second shot at getting things right. Web systems are a means of expression. Web images and words tell the world who you are, how you think, and what you stand for. I'll help you make sense of content development and site design and how these contribute to a reliable, organized, informative Web. You'll get answers in plain language and your Web audience won't have a problem understanding your site. I'll guide you toward sound decisions about solid content and appropriate technologies – I'll help you Webify. You won't have to guess whether your site works. You will know.
I might collect a set of requirements and expectations from you and your users about what you want from your site. Then I can use this set as a checklist against your site to determine whether it provides what you say it should. The results tell you how well your site delivers what you want. This inquiry is fundamental. I'm collecting feature or function points and asking how well these match your site specifications. It's a snapshot of your site, an image of your site in action as defined by its processes, data, and procedures. The extent of this inquiry is limited only by the scope and depth of information you need. I might examine your competitors' sites and set those features against your site for comparison. I don't need to collect requirements and expectations from your competitors for this because I'm comparing them to you. If you want to compare yourself to them, I'll build an image of their requirements and expectations. I'll act on these as if they were my client. You'll become the target of comparison. This is reverse benchmarking. A reverse benchmark helps you gauge how your site compares with and contrasts against your peers, giving you a look at similarities, differences, and relative strengths. I might build short prescriptive reports on what you must do to improve your site relative to your industry peers and your user expectations. These can cover several subjects. I might, for example, articulate how well your site implements core technologies; the quality of your Web development environment; the appropriateness of your Web development tools; the level of your Web staff's skills; the balance and interplay of your open and proprietary systems; or the ideas communicated by your site. From here you'll have a better idea of how you can pull even, move ahead, stay on top of, and dominate online communications within your market. If you want your site to stand apart from and above the competition, it must be distinctive and might need new features, functions, or styling. This often requires a partial or full Web restructuring. You will need to call upon your programmers, designers, marketers, communicators, human resources professionals, and more for this strategic shift.
Your situation dictates the questions I ask. Working from a fixed collection of queries would produce a fixed collection of answers. Here are some things you might want clarified:
If you are an archivist, digital publisher, executive producer, public relations manager, media manager, Web manager, or editor I can help you. We can work together to address issues such as these:
If you're responsible for the success of an online information complex or plan to launch a network publishing venture, contact me.
What do you want to accomplish? We can put your books, periodicals, and multimedia on the Web. We can Webify reference materials for immediate use. We can hook pages into a database to support your employees and clients. We can create communications channels that strengthen your organization and extend your borders. We can enhance your presentations by delivering them over the Web. We can deliver your data securely anywhere in the world to any of your portable devices over a seamless, fast network. We can teach, organize, and mobilize your learners. We can inform, persuade, and create a sense of community for your clients. We can blend software and content to convey your ideas with impact. Do you have something to say? Then we can do this and more. Webified information is a departure point. It leads users to embark on and explore new angles and outcomes. When you Webify something, all of your users can participate directly in any communication and any project. If you advertise, market, provide human resources, or perform consumer relations, or if you create, share, store, or deliver information, I can help you harness the power of the Web to extend your reach.
Try the The Good Web™ series for commentary on the need for better Webs and the processes that build them. This information is reduced to bullet-points in The Elements of Textware and The Stylesheet. Also, try the Object-oriented miniFAQ 0.61 (85,809 bytes; you'll need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print it). The miniFAQ introduces ideas about objects. Modularizing software with objects is a key abstraction. I use the deprecated Booch notation rather than the unified modeling language (UML) because Booch is easy to grasp. You can read the versions of Heavy Rotation, Domain-Nation, and Port Wars that appeared in the ACM's Ubiquity magazine. And finally, there is Incarna, my traffic-parsing firewall. Incarna is composed of an interface, a data model, and a parser. This architecture is now widely used.
The answer to this question begins with a question: What motivates your design? Newsletters, reference manuals, novels, and love letters don't need graphics to communicate. When I subscribe to a professional publication and pay several hundred dollars each year for the information, I don't want the editors spending a lot of time deciding whether the color balance on a particular page needs a more saturated red.
On the other hand, if your business is graphics-based or requires images, as an art portfolio or product catalog do, then you need the illustrations. They are central to the purpose of your message and have information value. Even here, initially building your site without graphics has value. It forces discipline on your content and layout. It demands that you keep in mind that the next computing device to hit your site for information might not be a browser but a pager, a PDA, a Sony PlayStation, or an airliner data console. These devices are as much a computer as your back-office hardware. Pages must start life conveying a clear message, without distractions that reduce their essential content. Where possible, pages should remain free of the dated assumption that the industrial package of the computers accessing them consists of screens, mice, keyboards, and CPUs. At that point, it is fair to use or consider using graphics for punch since your message is already present. Images grow from lean prose, crisp, deft narrative – and graphics. You have many image-building vehicles to deploy. Don't buy the fallacy that the depth of a message is always and only enhanced by graphics. In that case, the random noise on the Web, especially the ads, would be denser in information than anything conveyed by words. That's obviously false. Not much can meaningfully be said to an audience dependent on visual tricks and to cater solely to them traps you into creating on behalf of your medium rather than your message. (For more, see The Elements of Textware and The Stylesheet.)
Learn HTML, then learn JavaScript. JavaScript runs in a browser so you need the HTML to coddle JavaScript into producing acceptable output. Since JavaScript runs in a browser, you only need a browser and not an arsenal of tools to write, run, and test code. If you put pages on the Web, you automatically have the motivation to learn programming. This is better than most other languages, where the motivation is to learn how to read characters out of an array and find the one you've selected in advance. What fun. JavaScript lets you make your HTML pages exhibit programming language behaviors. This is dynamic HTML or DHTML. It is not a product, but something that happens when programming instructions are embedded inside an HTML page and interpreted by either the client or serving computers. There are proprietary flavors of dynamic HTML and I think you should skip them until you learn to code to an open standard. JavaScript is object-oriented, so you'll learn the primary paradigm used in programming today. JavaScript's core syntax is full-powered and full-featured, similar to C, C++, Java, and Perl, so you get a head start learning these languages and the concepts they let you express. JavaScript is interpreted rather than compiled, letting you change code quickly and learn faster. And, like Perl and Tcl, JavaScript supports regular expressions, so the language makes it easy to manipulate text. While JavaScript isn't directly related to Java, the JavaScript standard (ECMA-262 and ISO-16262) reserves words from the Java syntax, raising the possibility the two languages might someday operate more closely. JavaScript, however, can control the actions of Java applets and rightly can be considered a scripting language for Java. Finally, for the mercantilist in you, JavaScript (and HTML) are marketable. I'm partial to Lisp; it is the best language for many programming tasks and Lisp traits constitute the heart of nearly every modern programming paradigm. But Lisp isn't marketable; JavaScript is.
I don't use Microsoft file formats at this site. I once had Word DOC and RTF (rich text format) files here. Then I shifted to RTF only, which was Microsoft's contribution to shared formats for information exchange. You had to own Word to open a DOC; you had to upgrade Word to open DOCs made in newer versions of Word; and the Office formats in general are great vehicles for people who like to infect your network with viruses, Trojans, and other computational poison. I felt RTF freed me from imposing these burdens on my readers. And RTF files work in anybody's word processor, not just Microsoft Word. RTF went through changes that rendered new and old versions of the format differently. I could live with that; I upgraded to RTF 1.5. It turns out RTF files contain personal information placed there by the Microsoft Office products, information like your name, the name of the person editing the file for you, where you work, where you store the file, and so forth. This is nobody's business unless the creator of the file says so. I no longer use RTF because I don't have time to clean this blabber from every file I produce. My presentation format is PDF (portable document format), which you can view and print using Adobe Acrobat. PDF is proprietary but so far has been free of hidden content about me in my documents that I didn't put there. Adobe gives away the Acrobat Reader for free. If I want, I can lock a PDF file so no one can easily change it. I also use text, which Microsoft (and IBM) try to subvert since it is a free, open standard central to Internet and Web architecture. The MS LineDraw TrueType font (48,296 bytes) lets you properly display all text files and accurately render the specifications for my analysis methods and tools. I place personal information in my documents and you can see it. It's called my name, address, telephone number, and email. When I decide not to put that information in a document, I don't want to fight my word processor to keep it out. If you work with any Microsoft Office product, information about you gets into your Office files without your permission. That information has the potential to propagate to other formats. Until recently, Microsoft saw fit to have your computer transfer this information to them, for marketing purposes, without your consent. Most people working with these Microsoft products haven't the authority or know-how to shuck them and use something that exposes them less. This should tip you off to how Microsoft thinks about most of its customers. |
(If you came here looking for a wider range of clips, visit the
Do you want searchable information? Do you want someone who isn't
sighted to be able to use your resources? Do you want anyone
using a search engine to be able to find your pages? Graphics
can't be searched, the blind can't make much use of them, and the
robots that index the Web for the search engines ignore anything
on a page that isn't text.