Action item: I urge any of you who still use Internet Explorer version 7 or earlier to upgrade to version 8. Better yet: switch to Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome – which were built from the ground up around the new web technology discussed below. This site will remain barely usable but will become increasingly unfriendly to pre-8 versions of Internet Explorer.

This site is broken

...At least from a purist's perspective. At present this site is hand-coded in HTML, using HTML tables for structure, a mix of HTML and CSS for formatting, and a dash of JavaScript for coding. Don't worry if that's all geek to you; it means this site is currently built on technology that's now past it's best-before date. My design philosophy – if it can be graced with such an impressive-sounding phrase – has always been simplicity, flexibility, and robustness over pizzazz. For example: I understand the left-side nav bar is now considered quaint and retro in some circles; my concerns with it are that it uses up precious screen real estate on small displays like my netbook and that it disappears on a long page.

Several issues have been increasingly nagging at me re my site design:

• How to cope with the ever-increasing variety of display sizes in use from iPhone to Apple Cinema
• How to control text column width on large displays
• How to keep text size legible across all display sizes.

Newspaper and magazine pages are divided into columns because it's much easier for the eye to keep track of it's position in a short line of text than a long one. When I started this site a typical display size was 800x600 pixels, now many of my visitors are using 1900x1200 pixel displays, and a 1900 pixel line length is as absurd as a newspaper with no columns.

Your browser is broken

...If you're one of the less than 10% of the visitors to this site who use Internet Explorer at a version less than the 7. Eight years ago, when it was first launched, Internet Explorer 6 was bleeding edge; now it's as funky as a 1980's Camaro. Non-web-techies will not realize just how frustrating it now is for developers to work around its limitations; and for an ever-increasing number of problems there are no workarounds.

Internet Explorer 6 problems: Fig. 2 shows what a somewhat eariler version of this page looked like with no IE6 workarounds in place. The first red circle, shows the copyright line being split into two lines. The second red circle shows a bizarre horizontal line and dark rectangle splitting the caption from the picture it describes. The spiffy new rounded corners are missing. But more than cosmetics, because IE6 (and earlier) browsers don't understand the code that I'm using to dynamically resize column width, I'm forced to use a fixed width. Because IE6 doesn't understand layering, the masthead scrolls off-screen as you scroll down the page. Internet Explorer 7 has its own problems but nowhere near as many as IE6 and earlier.

My own attitude toward software and hardware upgrades, has long been minimalist. It takes a lot to get me to upgrade. Every bigger-is-better upgrade has more code and therefore more opportunities to crash my computer; plus fatter code gobbles up precious hard drive and RAM resources. I see truly evil corporations like Sony, Microsoft, and Adobe attempting to sneak crippling functionality into my computer to lock users into their products.

BUT browser upgrades are (so far, at least) an exception. The Internet is a rapidly evolving entity. When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML (the underlying technology behind the web) in 1980, he was blazing an utterly new trail. Most of his vision was truly inspired, but certain aspects later proved too confining. We went through a long period of increasingly complex work-arounds to the constrictions inherent in HTML. Now elegant replacement technologies have arisen (XHTML and CSS). These technologies aren't of the bigger-is-better variety but of the leaner-and meaner variety. The catch is that you need an up-to-date browser to acecss them.

A fix is on the way

Researching a solution to the limitations to the current design of this site described in the first section, I've had a religious experience and will be converting this site to the elegant new technologies described in the second section: strict XHTML for content, CSS for structure and formatting, while retaining JavaScript for functional coding. This is the way I always would have built this site had I known the tools needed for this approach existed ten years ago. (They did, but were then very obscure.)

This page is an early example of what will become the new design for this site.

• If you are using a large monitor at a high resolution, try maximizing your browser. Rather than fill the whole width of your screen the content portion of this page maxes out at 750 pixels.
• But if instead, you use a small display or set your browser to a narrow width, this page should gracefully re-dimension itself accordingly.
• If the default font size is too large or too small it should respond nicely to your browser's zoom commands, such as Ctrl+ and Ctrl- (Windows), Command+ and Command- (Mac).
• The layout should be uncluttered and easy to understand; the colours should be easy on the eye with enough contrast between text and background to make for easy legibility.

But it's a work in progress; I welcome any and all feedback.