Tech. Stuff

Content Dictates Design

Ms. Youngren is a narrative story-teller, and the content of the presentation is, ultimately, just her words. If she were also a painter, perhaps there would be pictures to go with the stories, but she isn't so there aren't.

We've pondered this because so many web reviewers object. Online multimedia is new, they say; we should “use the medium” and web pages should be like, well, video games. Now, games are nice, but check the fiction section of bookstores: wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling narrative storytelling selling like hotcakes, in plain text. A technological limitation? Check the children's section: fully integrated text, graphics, sounds, smells, textures; all in better fidelity than online. Books for grownups don't have pictures because they don't need them. We've talked to our visual artist friends about this, and Rowena remains black text on a white background.

So if we're not interested in “using the medium,” why did we put this on the web at all? The main reason, of course, is access. Rowena may be in bookstores by-and-by, but she's here, now. And the web does have presentation advantages over, say, ftp or Gopher. I've tried to use graphic principles to help make the pages navigable, and strained my drawing ability to the limit for the “dust jacket.”

Medium Dictates Method

Your choice of computer and browser are up to you. We just want to show you some stories. Standard HTML (and a bit of work) lets us say that these pages are “best enjoyed with” anything.

If you're curious, check the source for the title page (list of stories):

• Still saving for that 24 bit video system? All the colors, including those in the images, are from an ultra browser-safe 16 color pallette.
• Feeling text-only today? The ALT tags tell you what you need to know.
• Like your window a different size than mine? The combination of a table width of 512px, and “nowrap” tags for the story title cells allows the display to adjust smoothly. And the horizontal images are made a little narrow, just in case.
• Have a slow connection (and who doesn't)? Height and width tags for the images should let you start reading before they've loaded. And those images are small, and largely reused from page to page.
• Still using an HTML 2 browser? A few “unnecessary” paragraph and line-break tags in the right places, and it almost looks like we designed it that way.

Now, I've been a programmer for some years, and I don't want to act like this is a big deal (although embedding a text-only HTML 2 page inside a graphic 3.2 page is a neat trick). But there are different philosophies of web page design; we spent a fair amount of effort working out ours, and it's not the most common one. If you were curious about why or how these pages look this way, now you know.

By the way, browsers and such are changing constantly. If anything on the pages doesn't work for you, or just looks dumb, drop me a note. I'll see what we can do.

Return to the List of Stories Write to the Author (I like e-mail from readers, and answer when I can.) Read About the Stories -- Read About the Author

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