These pages are are optimized for archaic browsers using low-bandwidth Internet access.
No, really.
I started them by playing around with Netscape 4.78's Composer, which is a pretty good program for something that is free. It has its drawbacks, which for me are mainly that it inserts coding that you don't want. For example, if you define a block of type and change the typeface, it will insert a command to start that typeface at the beginning of each paragraph and another one to turn it off at the end. This is problematic because the command that tells it to turn off the typeface puts a little extra space above the last line of the paragraph, and that looks silly. I work around this by opening the HTML in Simple Text (like Notepad for you Windows users) and removing the superfluous code with the search/replace function.
I find it greatly satisfying to create and edit web pages in Simple Text. You type in words and HTML tags (very similar to the kind of typesetting codes that Atex used, for those old enough to remember), then open the page in a browser and Voila! There is a web page.
My home connection is a 56k dial-up, and that inspires me to keep these pages simple. I don't like frames or floating tool bars, and if a page is planned around them, then it can't be accessed by devices that don't show them. For now, that includes cell phones. I also don't like the goofy use of colors and alternate typefaces just to show that you know the codes. Most of my page backgrounds are a muted gray-green, which can be recreated by using the HLS color picker set to 115/16/84. In HTML, this color is invoked with the tag #D1DDD0.
The only graphics-intensive pages on my site
are the photos, and I don't plan to make any of them larger than my Burning
Man 2002 pictures. I used Kai's
Photo Soap, which came with the iMac computer (mine is the original
Bondi Blue, Rev. A model) to make the small photos on the page and to reduce
the size of the information-rich files that came out of my camera. The
photos you see if you click on the small images are about a quarter the
size of the originals.