Serious Computerist - Website

[griz]

 

DOS 3 was the 1st one I used on the Atari. Came with the 1st 1050 I got.

Same here. But I was also given 2.5 from the store I bought my 1050 from and was encouraged not to bother with Dos 3.

[+MrFish]

Same here. But I was also given 2.5 from the store I bought my 1050 from and was encouraged not to bother with Dos 3.

 

My first disk drive came with both too, but I quickly discovered what I needed to do...

[griz]

 

My first disk drive came with both too, but I quickly discovered what I needed to do...

 

Come to think of it, when I got that 1050 it was my first disk drive ever. I began computing on a Vic-20 with a tape drive and when I moved to an Atari 8 bit I spent several months without a tape drive or a disk drive. I would type in Antic and Compute! listings anyways and remember my cousing turning off my Atari late at night thinking she was doing me a favour. I spent hours typing in something, can't remember what, and a power cycle of course meant it lost everything. So I *really* appreciated my first disk drive more than some.

 

Mr Fish : Html 4 + frames = Dos 3.

Edited January 24, 2016 by griz

[+MrFish]

Come to think of it, when I got that 1050 it was my first disk drive ever. I began computing on a Vic-20 with a tape drive and when I moved to an Atari 8 bit I spent several months without a tape drive or a disk drive. I would type in Antic and Compute! listings anyways and remember my cousing turning off my Atari late at night thinking she was doing me a favour. I spent hours typing in something, can't remember what, and a power cycle of course meant it lost everything. So I *really* appreciated my first disk drive more than some.

 

Yeah, they were my first disk drives ever too. I got a pair of 1050's.

 

 

Mr Fish : Html 4 + frames = Dos 3.

 

Haha... I don't think so...

[Kyle22]

Beautiful site. Don't worry about HTML & whatnot, it's the content that matters.

[+MrFish]

Beautiful site. Don't worry about HTML & whatnot, it's the content that matters.

 

Glad you like it... no worries here...

[+MrFish]

I actually missed this post until just now. I just saw the ones that came after it -- at first -- which now make a little more sense in light of this post.

 

Html 5 is actually cleaner and simpler than Html 4 as you don't need to use all of it's features. I thought I'd spare you further complexity than is needed and yes, it's a more modern standard.

 

I'd imagine that to be true -- and hopefully so as it's to be the next phase in the evolution of the language. My use of HTML 4 had more to do with familiarity than anything else. As I said, I was basically just starting out with this project, other than having minimal experience -- mainly years ago (2006?).

 

 

Frames can get in the way when people bookmark your pages and are generally being discouraged these days. "Responsive design" (as they call it) is when your site adjusts to multiple platforms (desktop, phone, tablet, etc). That's tricky with frames.

 

Yes, I'm aware of the problems with bookmarking, and getting out of frames when linking to other sites. The former I don't mind at all, as I think it's reasonable to allow bookmarking to the main page, but I'm sure many would disagree with this philosophy. That latter I was able to handle fine and to my liking, but can give different results depending on the browser being used.

 

I'm not sure about how difficult "responsive design" may be be because I've made no attempts at it yet. I'll expect the worst at this point.

 

 

I've been using php/html/css/js for more than a dozen years professionally; it's been my bread and butter. If I get a chance perhaps I can write a few tutorials for you on my website. Your simple site is a perfect candidate to be a modern, responsive site that's easy to maintain and works everywhere. I'm only trying to teach and help, please don't think you need any changes whatsoever. Your site is looking great as is.

 

Cool... no, as I said, I'm glad to have any comments about my site at all. I was more expecting comments geared at the content and general design, but I'll take all the pointers I can get about coding as well. Whether I actually heed the advice is another matter, but I'm definitely interested in what you have to say, and will certainly take it all into consideration.

 

 

If your site contains errors or doesn't conform to standards, it's position in Google will be lowered. The Width and Height attributes for IMG tags are required to conform to the standard as you pointed out, but also if they are not specified you get "Popping". That's when the content of a web page jumps all over the place as it's resized to fit the images as they are loaded in. If the web browser knows ahead of time (the dimensions of the images), the page loads without popping. For what it's worth, this isn't even noticeable on your site, just a good habit to get into.

 

OK, that doesn't surprise me at all about Google. Still not a big concern to me, but it may become one at some point, or with some other project.

 

That makes sense about the IMG tags and height and width. I haven't noticed any movement of content with regards to loading of images when they're uncached. But I may not have been paying close attention either. It'd be a lot easier to deal with if my images were all the same size. They are the same size vertically, but horizontally is where they're variable. Anyway, point taken there.

 

 

Glad to know DOS 3 has a place on your site. I know it's crap, but it's nostalgic. Thanks for the hard work, I appreciate it.

 

It doesn't. Maybe you thought that was a link to my site that I posted above, but it was to Atarimania. I have no plans to add DOS 3. As I've mentioned, this site isn't about covering everything out there. I have absolutely no nostalgia about DOS 3, and anyone who does can fulfill their needs elsewhere.

 

Edited January 24, 2016 by MrFish

[HiassofT]

Nice site, and I also like the clean and simple design! Well done!

 

As for frames: if you don't want to use server-side scripting like PHP to include the boilerplate/navigation/... blocks in every page you could solve this via local scripting on your PC. Just have a preprocessor generate the complete HTML pages from your fragments - a simple makefile plus M4 (or some other text preprocessor) might be enough for a start. Several years ago a friend of mine was looking into rest2web which basically does this but I haven't looked at it myself so I'm not sure if it's really useful.

 

And I can also recommend having a closer look at HTML5 / CSS3. Finally you can do things that were a real PITA before and it's also a lot easier to separate your content (which goes into the HTML file) from the layout (which goes into CSS).

 

One thing I really enjoy using in CSS3 is calc(). Want a 100 pixel navigation block on the left and the rest of your screen dedicated to content? Just use "width: calc(100% - 100px)".

 

Media queries are also nice: a few blocks like "@media screen and (min-width: 400px) { ..." to group your different styles in your css file is all you need to create some basic responsive design. Just play around with it a bit, resize your browser window and watch the layout change - it's really fun!

 

If you separate content from layout (eg instead of using tables use "ul" for a list of navigation links, all inside a "nav" block, everything styled in css) the website will be a lot more accessible for people with screen readers etc - and hopefully also for people using text-mode browsers on their 8bit machines, to finally get on-topic again :-)

 

so long,

 

Hias

[gozar]

As for frames: if you don't want to use server-side scripting like PHP to include the boilerplate/navigation/... blocks in every page you could solve this via local scripting on your PC. Just have a preprocessor generate the complete HTML pages from your fragments - a simple makefile plus M4 (or some other text preprocessor) might be enough for a start. Several years ago a friend of mine was looking into rest2web which basically does this but I haven't looked at it myself so I'm not sure if it's really useful.

 

Static website generation has really become popular in the last couple of years. I use Pelican for my website at gtia.com. Content is written as Markdown, and make github creates the site and uploads it to Github for hosting. GitHub uses Jekyll by default, which allows you to host a web page on GitHub without installing anything except for git.

 

Pelican or Jekyll creates pure html sites that can be hosted anywhere.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[+MrFish]

Nice site, and I also like the clean and simple design! Well done!

 

Hi Hias... thanks for the compliment and comments.

 

 

As for frames: if you don't want to use server-side scripting like PHP to include the boilerplate/navigation/... blocks in every page you could solve this via local scripting on your PC. Just have a preprocessor generate the complete HTML pages from your fragments - a simple makefile plus M4 (or some other text preprocessor) might be enough for a start. Several years ago a friend of mine was looking into rest2web which basically does this but I haven't looked at it myself so I'm not sure if it's really useful.

 

OK, I may look into it at some point.

 

 

And I can also recommend having a closer look at HTML5 / CSS3. Finally you can do things that were a real PITA before and it's also a lot easier to separate your content (which goes into the HTML file) from the layout (which goes into CSS).

 

I agree, using CSS is great, and makes your HTML so much cleaner. I haven't completely avoided studying HTML5, and already have plans for using some in the near future.

 

 

One thing I really enjoy using in CSS3 is calc(). Want a 100 pixel navigation block on the left and the rest of your screen dedicated to content? Just use "width: calc(100% - 100px)".

 

I think I'd seen that technique used, when I was searching for alternate methods after finishing my site.

 

 

Media queries are also nice: a few blocks like "@media screen and (min-width: 400px) { ..." to group your different styles in your css file is all you need to create some basic responsive design. Just play around with it a bit, resize your browser window and watch the layout change - it's really fun!

 

Thanks, I'll check that out too.

 

 

If you separate content from layout (eg instead of using tables use "ul" for a list of navigation links, all inside a "nav" block, everything styled in css) the website will be a lot more accessible for people with screen readers etc - and hopefully also for people using text-mode browsers on their 8bit machines, to finally get on-topic again :-)

 

Yes, unfortunately I didn't come across "NAV" until I was almost finished with my site. The main reason I didn't convert the menu I had at the time is because I wanted to spend more time adding content -- even though it's a fairly trivial conversion. I still may convert it at some point. What makes it more "accessible" for screen readers than using a table?

Edited January 24, 2016 by MrFish

[HiassofT]

Yes, unfortunately I didn't come across "NAV" until I was almost finished with my site. The main reason I didn't convert the menu I had at the time is because I wanted to spend more time adding content -- even though it's a fairly trivial conversion. I still may convert it at some point. What makes it more "accessible" for screen readers than using a table?

When you use nested lists you implicitly define semantic structure, you have top level entries and sub-entries. A table doesn't contain this semantic information.

 

For example, if you markup your menu in a way similar to this:

<ul>
  <li>Language
    <ul>
       <li>Assembler</li>
       <li>Basic</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li>DOS
    <ul>
      <li>Sparta</li>
      <li>Atari</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>

then you provide hints that can eg be used to quickly navigate / tab through top-level entries, decend into sub-levels etc.

 

When you have this semantic information you can also use it to easily style the menu in different ways. For example on a landscape screen show it like you are currently doing, on a portrait screen (smartphone) only show the top level entries and make the sub-menus fold out. Or you may also display it as a sitemap-style like this:

Language  DOS
Assembler Sparta
Basic     Atari

OTOH if you use a table to do the latter you've completely broken semantic structure, you'd tab through Language->Dos->Assembler->Sparta... And (text-mode) browsers are forced to display a table when with nested lists they could provide a possibly nicer representation.

 

The basic idea is to get away from formatting in HTML and only define semantic structure in your HTML document. That'll help all, screen-readers, various display devices (desktop vs smartphone) and search engines both to better "render" and "understand" the document.

 

When you are trying to achieve some specific layout there are still a lot of limitations on what you can do and a lot of pitfalls and corner-cases to keep in mind. But things are improving and HTML5/CSS3 is a nice step forward.

 

so long,

 

Hias

[+MrFish]

When you use nested lists you implicitly define semantic structure, you have top level entries and sub-entries. A table doesn't contain this semantic information.

 

For example, if you markup your menu in a way similar to this:

<ul>
  <li>Language
    <ul>
       <li>Assembler</li>
       <li>Basic</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li>DOS
    <ul>
      <li>Sparta</li>
      <li>Atari</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>

then you provide hints that can eg be used to quickly navigate / tab through top-level entries, decend into sub-levels etc.

 

When you have this semantic information you can also use it to easily style the menu in different ways. For example on a landscape screen show it like you are currently doing, on a portrait screen (smartphone) only show the top level entries and make the sub-menus fold out. Or you may also display it as a sitemap-style like this:

Language  DOS
Assembler Sparta
Basic     Atari

OTOH if you use a table to do the latter you've completely broken semantic structure, you'd tab through Language->Dos->Assembler->Sparta... And (text-mode) browsers are forced to display a table when with nested lists they could provide a possibly nicer representation.

 

The basic idea is to get away from formatting in HTML and only define semantic structure in your HTML document. That'll help all, screen-readers, various display devices (desktop vs smartphone) and search engines both to better "render" and "understand" the document.

 

When you are trying to achieve some specific layout there are still a lot of limitations on what you can do and a lot of pitfalls and corner-cases to keep in mind. But things are improving and HTML5/CSS3 is a nice step forward.

 

Yeah, I know tables are generally discouraged against for anything other than tabular data. They traditionally have been used for just about everything, because of the convenience and flexibility in laying out data, which is exactly why I've used them. Once I get into designing NAV bars I'll be using list items anyway. As I mentioned above, using the table was just something I came up with before discovering the NAV tag, but it sounds like there are good enough reasons to convert what I have over, and it's simple enough to accomplish. I also had already planned to use NAV bars for any future projects. Thanks for pointers though.

[HiassofT]

As I mentioned above, using the table was just something I came up with before discovering the NAV tag, but it sounds like there are good enough reasons to convert what I have over, and it's simple enough to accomplish.

No problem with that and I certainly didn't want to criticise you.

 

I did / had to do similar stuff in the (not too far away) past, for example because some people insisted that a page also had to work with their ancient IE versions.

 

But I think time has finally come now to move away from these old habits and pull the trigger on ancient browser support.

 

Basic CSS3 support is already quite good in current browsers and people still using an ancient IE (or similar) have other stuff to worry about than degraded layout - browser bugs are one of the top attack vectors to get malware onto your PC/smart-device.

 

so long,

 

Hias

[+MrFish]

I did / had to do similar stuff in the (not too far away) past, for example because some people insisted that a page also had to work with their ancient IE versions.

 

But I think time has finally come now to move away from these old habits and pull the trigger on ancient browser support.

 

I agree with that 100%. I have no intent on supporting anything related to ancient IE versions. In fact I don't particularly care if something doesn't work just right in any version IE, which has a history of holding progress back. I test in IE, but my focus is on FireFox. I do want to keep the site simple, but that is just a general design philosophy. Even though I talked about working with Ataris in the future, I'm not going to let that be reason to cripple any design ideas that I want to achieve. Atari compatible versions can be done separately / generated if necessary.

 

 

Basic CSS3 support is already quite good in current browsers and people still using an ancient IE (or similar) have other stuff to worry about than degraded layout - browser bugs are one of the top attack vectors to get malware onto your PC/smart-device.

 

Agreed, although if browsers were only about HTML and CSS to begin with, the situation could be better.

[+MrFish]

I did / had to do similar stuff in the (not too far away) past, for example because some people insisted that a page also had to work with their ancient IE versions.

 

But I think time has finally come now to move away from these old habits and pull the trigger on ancient browser support.

 

Yes, I was actually wondering, because I'd seen your site quite a few times before, which contains quite a few tables.

 

Do you have any examples of other sites you've worked on that employ some of the HTML5/CSS3 techniques you speak of?

[HiassofT]

Yes, I was actually wondering, because I'd seen your site quite a few times before, which contains quite a few tables.

It's a retro-computer site so using (w3 validated) retro HTML 3.2 is quite appropriate I think :-)

 

BTW: Using tables to display tabular content is still allowed in HTML5.

 

Do you have any examples of other sites you've worked on that employ some of the HTML5/CSS3 techniques you speak of?

Sorry, can't really help here. I'm not too much into this web-stuff (and definitely no web designer) and don't have anything that I'd recommend using as a reference. The last thing I did was for a project at work about a year ago but I had to hack a lot of legacy-fallbacks into CSS and also stay away from several cool features because, well, older browser versions still mattered...

 

so long,

 

Hias

[+MrFish]

It's a retro-computer site so using (w3 validated) retro HTML 3.2 is quite appropriate I think :-)

 

Sure... no complaints here, and as you can tell from my site, I favor simpler design and layout.

 

 

BTW: Using tables to display tabular content is still allowed in HTML5.

 

Definitely, although from what I could gather a host of properties are going to be done away with. I was mainly just concerned with whether or not to get my menu out of a table.

 

 

Sorry, can't really help here. I'm not too much into this web-stuff (and definitely no web designer) and don't have anything that I'd recommend using as a reference. The last thing I did was for a project at work about a year ago but I had to hack a lot of legacy-fallbacks into CSS and also stay away from several cool features because, well, older browser versions still mattered...

 

Alright... well the theory still stands. I'd already read a lot of what we're discussing.

[+MrFish]

I've added a couple of new entries: Atari Macro Assembler (mandatory for my site) and OSS OS/A+ v2.1 & v4.1

If you've visited the site recently -- depending on your browser settings and how long it's been since your last visit -- you may have use "refresh" in order to see the recent changes.

 

I'll most likely be adding an "Updates/News" page soon -- as either the landing page or a subsection under "Home" -- so anyone just interested in recent changes won't have to scan the whole site.

 

Link to the site is in my sig...

 

Edited January 28, 2016 by MrFish

[kenjennings]

Cool site. I like that it is simple and loads quickly. (not loaded with mountains of CSS nonsense.)

 

Keep it simple. Ignore the nit-picking about HTML purity. In the end you'll waste a ton of your time and still not make everyone happy.

[+MrFish]

Cool site. I like that it is simple and loads quickly. (not loaded with mountains of CSS nonsense.)

 

Keep it simple. Ignore the nit-picking about HTML purity. In the end you'll waste a ton of your time and still not make everyone happy.

 

Thanks, good to hear you appreciate the site. Whatever it ends up growing into, it'll always be a goal to keep things lean.

 

I don't think anyone was nitpicking, really -- except about frames -- which is understandable given their future. Most of the things suggested weren't anything that would bloat the site or take much time to change anyway. The banner and menu code is quite small.

 

Anyway, I'm interested to hear what people think, content as well as design and coding. I never said it was a committee project, but it can make for some interesting discussions.

[+MrFish]

Some of these transitional support functions directed towards specific browsers can eat up space in your CSS though; such as this, used for columns:

UL.Column3
{
    WIDTH: 540PX;
    -WEBKIT-COLUMN-COUNT: 3;
    -MOZ-COLUMN-COUNT: 3;
    COLUMN-COUNT: 3;
}

The intention I suppose is to get people away from using tables for simple columnar layouts. Simple enough, it's just a matter of knowing when it needs to be augmented like this or not. Eventually it won't be an issue.

Edited January 29, 2016 by MrFish

[+MrFish]

Created an "Update" page, with links to recent additions:

 

Edited January 30, 2016 by MrFish

[+MrFish]

Fixed a couple of problems in certain browsers with the new "Update" page.

 

The links were opening new pages/tabs in some browsers -- rather than browsing in place as intended -- and mouse-hovers weren't working properly in some browsers as well. Everything should be fine now.

[+MrFish]

Added a "Resource" section and various materials to the site.

[morelenmir]

Added a "Resource" section and various materials to the site.

 

I hate to say it, but for some reason 'Malware Bytes' has suddenly begun filtering your website as 'malicious'! I do not doubt for one second it is a false positive, but 'ABE' in NoScript is also popping up with a block as well. Is it possible there is a problem with the updates you made recently that has led to an - unjustified - blacklist entry?