SIGNS OF THE TIMES, my site, has been almost entirely text - is a choice I made out of my early experiances with the web; the frustration of waiting intermitable hours for downloads to complete; many of which never did. That being the case at the time, I turned off graphic rendering on my browser, in fact often did not use a browser at all, opting for a drive load of single purpose applications instead. A mail clent for email. An FTP client for file transfers. A news client for newsgroups. An IRC client for... You get the drift.
Not only did I obstain from trafficing in graphic data on the web, I resisted use if a Graphic User Interface of any kind for a similar reason... horrific storage space and machine resourse squandering slowed computers of the time to, at best, a crawl next to DOS based applications. That was then.
Now, I've collected enough machines, with enough resources, that together, as a network, they handle the massive storage requirements of todays GUI... Windows... One machine strictly used as a hardware gateway, two others doing service as active file servers, two pure DOS 'storage' machines; all networked to service the needs of my (check this!) multi-boot system... Incredible. But that's what I've done; and it (my network) works impressively well. (Not that I'm biased or anything like that.)
For more on computers, my 'Pheonix' machines and myself, read About JD
Needless to say, since I never crawled the web with graphics enabled until recently, my only interest was, and still mostly is, text. For that (those?) reasons my attempt(s) to establish a web presence has been completely devoid of graphic content - meaning none whatsoever. That's changed, but not much. The main element of SIGNS, has been and always will be, text. However, I've come to the conclusion that some graphic content isn't all bad. So, for those of you browsing my turf who want (need?) that sort of thing, I'm attempting, working on, trying to, gather up some relevant visual material - IE: pictures.
Take those on SIGNS OF THE TIMES home page for instance. They doen't have anything to do with the contents of this site - yet. I'm working on the story behind the pictures... For now they'r interesting pictures.
Another effect of my near manical resistance to moving from DOS to a GUI, namely Windows, is that I have never seen or tried, much less used or own, any sort of HTML generation software. I have, however, seen countless examples of web page HTML source documents generously overstocked with repetitive, redundant; did I say repeated; HTML code, overstuffed in fact - all of which boasted having been produced by this, that or the other HTML generation software. Incredible documents that contain pages of code for a few lines of content which appears to serve no purpose other than to use up drive space, processor time, not to mention communications band width needlessly.
Early on I resolved to not emulate the greatest portion of material available on the web; to not present material overburdened with excessive code overhead. The results are:
It should be noted that the introduction of "style sheet" formatting to HTML has provided a method by which much of the repetative code can be removed from the actual web page documents. The price appears to be dual syntax command structure - one for 'in line' and the other for remote 'style sheet' application, using similar terms but diffferent grammer; often different meaning.and application. (Very much like the English language does, making it one of, if not the, most difficult to learn.)
Funny how, 'Not much to tell,' turns into so much...
JD