About these pages...

Here you can read my personal opinion on the internet, web-design, etc.

About...

Every program seems to have an option in the menu called 'About...', so I am calling this part the same. ;-)

My first experience with "the internet" (although it wasn't called that way) was sending electronic messages and files through a local access provider in the Netherlands to a friend in the United States. I used a terminal program, dialed the provider, uploaded my texts and files and typed in the destination. My friend would check his "inbox" later to download the message and attachments. This was in the late eighties.

At that time, noone had heard of web-pages yet. The internet was about newsgroups and FTP. Finding published information was a quest. I remember my first experience, when a guy in a obscure library room at the University of Amsterdam had a terminal with access to research files of universities all over the world. He could even type in keywords to search for similar documents. At the time (early nineties) this seemed incredible. He was using Gopher and Archie.

Then a guy at CERN created the "World Wide Web" and everything changed. There are already more than a billion web-pages on the internet, filled with information.

Back to top

Standards

Most will remember the Internet Explorer vs. Netscape war. Authors of web-pages had to test their design in both browsers to verify the result. Then came JavaScript, Flash, multi-media... And chaos installed itself.

The World Wide Web became a showcase of design (in)capability. It became difficult to find information between all the animated / blinking / images, videos and sound.

HTML is supposed to be for content. The lay-out of a web-page should be defined in stylesheets. Tables in HTML are for tabular information: pricelists, catalog data, etc.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines standards of the XHTML language, CSS Stylesheets amongst others.

All my pages are in conformity with the XHTML 1.0-Strict standard and the CSS2 Specification.

Back to top

Accessibility

In my opinion, information should be free and easy to access. Easy to access for everyone. This means it should be accessible with every browser, not just one or two, but all, including Lynx. Pages should also be accessible for people with disabilities, and this is simpler than it may sound.

The World Wide Web Consortium created the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to develop guidelines and techniques how to publish pages accessible by everyone.

My pages are in conformity with Level A Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Back to top