SS > misc > Web page design

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

-- Robert Wilensky, University of California at Berkeley, 1996

Abigail's WWW Dream -- how it could be, but not (yet?) how it is -- although Bertrand Meyer thinks it is changing.
Jakob Nielsen's Website on good web design, with excellent columns like Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design and the problems of linkrot
Lynx Viewer to see your site as others may see it.
review: Web Pages that Suck
All purpose disclaimer

Russ Allbery's eloquent rant about how Internet newsgroups are being ruined by lazy spammers, misusing them for tasks better suited to the Web anyway.

Composing Good HTML
Web Design Group's Web Authoring FAQ
The HTML Coded Character Set
When you've just been told, yet again, to upgrade your browser, the HTML Terrorist's Handbook provides a little light relief. I particularly like the page that presents appropriately on frameless browsers but not on those that support frames!

I'm perfectly happy to use "old" versions. Most of this stuff is available in much more recent versions, often with the orignal company having been taken over! But, "if it ain't broke, don't fix [or upgarde] it"...

SoftQuad's HoTMetaL PRO 4.0, to write HTML. I used to use just a text editor, but it was getting a bit too complex to maintain and check everything.
Hewlett Packard's ScanJet 6300C, for scanning text and images.
JASC's Paint Shop Pro 4.12, to convert scanned images to JPGs, and LaTeX screen images to transparent gifs.
Smalltalk/V Windows, for generating my book review pages.
Caere's OmniPage Pro 10, for recognising scanned text.
MathType 5.0, to format mathematics, saving the result as transparent gifs. (Or I occassionally use LaTeX, view on screen, grab the image into Paint Shop Pro, and save as a gif. One day I'll get around to MathML).
Xenu's Link Sleuth 1.2j, for finding broken links.

Using OCR leads to some fun misreadings, like Steinbeck's lesser-known soft-furnishing classic The Drapes of Wrath, and that obscure branch of the mathematics of fruit the distribution of prune numbers.

Consider the answer you might receive by asking a school pupil the question "What is two plus two?" in each of the past five decades:

1956: "Four, of course."
1966: "Three, but it's the method that's important."
1976: "Just a second while I get out my calculator."
1986: "Just a second while I launch Calculator on my Mac."
1996: "Just a second while I check the addition home page."

-- attributed to C. Harald Koch
in New Scientist's Feedback column, 4 Jan 1997