Update on the Squeak-material on my site

Maarten Maartensz maartens at xs4all.nl
Wed Jan 2 12:34:29 UTC 2002


Hello.

Doug Way wrote:

>>Maarten Maartensz wrote:
>> 
>> L.S.
>> 
>> It may interest some to know that I have given Squeak its own directory on
>> my site and have extended the html- versions of my user manual (in
progress).
>> 
>> The relevant direct link is:
>> 
>> http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/squeak/squeak_index.htm

>Thanks for the link; your diary about discovering Squeak is interesting.

>A minor problem:  The "Map", "Tour", etc., links from your Squeak page 
>seem to be pointing to invalid (local) addresses such as 
>file:///C:/webmm/map.htm.  You may want to fix these.

Thanks for the information. I'll look into it, and only add that while I DO
make mistakes, FrontPage 2000 seems to have gone into a buggy mode again,
for it *ought* to rewrite these links automatically from my harddisk to my
servers harddisk: I paid for the program i.a. to have this facility. O,
well ... I do want to fix this, indeed, and will soon.

>> ...
>> Having seen my own site recently on a local internet-cafe, that did not
>> display part of my site as it should (probably due to a combination of
>> factors including MS buggery):
>> 
>> - my site should display in Arial 12 point bold

>Looks fine to me on IE and Netscape.

Thanks. It turns indeed out that the display at various places, even in
nominally the same browser, may differ considerably (due to browser
settings, computer settings, video settings, internet-cafe settings etc.).
Not having an eternal life, I spend systematic effort only on trying to
assure it does work on the kind of set-up I use.

>Also, I don't mind your frequent use of coloring text (usually red) for
emphasis, 
>but I might suggest that you use a different color such as blue (ideally the 
>default html-link blue color) rather than red for links, so that the links
are easier 
>to distinguish from the regular emphasized text.

Yes. However, what I found - the last 15 years of daily computing - is that
it is difficult enough to work well withing one format (such as html), and
nearly or totally impossible to satisfy from within such a format different
conventions useful for other file-formats. So by and large what I try to do
is having decent html that is recognisably the same over my site. (And long
before knowing Squeak I settled on red+underlining for links.)

>This confusion is a bigger problem if you're using Scamper in Squeak... 
>the links there are not underlined but are represented with colored text.

This I haven't tried out, and indeed at the moment the differences in
capacity between Scamper and standard html-browsers are too large to try to
satisfy both on my site.

>This makes me think that it might be a good idea to change Scamper 
>so that hyperlinks are underlined.  Ignoring the fact that all other web 
>browsers do this, using underlines just seems like a better idea for 
>hyperlinks... using colored text basically prevents you from ever using 
>colored text for anything else.  The underline seems to be a more
significant 
>change in emphasis than a different color, which, for a hyperlink, is good, 
>IMHO.  (Underline also seems more appropriate than bold, italic,
strikethru, etc.)

>Maybe I'll submit a changeset sometime if noone else does. :)

That seems altogether a good idea to me. And maybe another thing you might
try, which is convenient to have is that the format changes of a link when
the mouse is on it. For example, in part of the files on my site the links
- in IE at least - change to small capitals and change back to normal when
the mouse is removed. This is helpful to see what is and isn't a link, but
may not be easy to implement. 

In any case: Underlined hyperlinks would make Scamper's representation of
links conform to what non-Squeak users expect.

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com

Regards,

Maarten.
--------------------------------------------------------
Maarten Maartensz.
Website in Amsterdam about philosophy, logic, 
M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) and much more:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/
more than 25 MB of stimulating and original ideas.
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