This page collects the tools profiled in the occasional TBTF feature Essential Tools. These are on-Net resources that I've found useful in developing Web content, or in keeping an eye on Web standards and trends.
Resources that are no longer current are shown in grey type.
Here is a teaching site both useful and cool. A teacher of HTML, Vincent Flanders <vincent@vincentflanders.com>, supplies nearly 50 negative examples -- Web Pages That Suck -- to reinforce lessons in good design. The site requires frames; in fact it's an exemplar of what frames are good for. The lessons start here . One of my favorites is "High on Kai" in the Graphics section. Kai is Kai Krause, whose venerable Photoshop plugin Kai's Power Tools has been misused or overused by every tyro designer who has ever laid hands on it. Referring to one particularly sweet KPT effect, Flanders promulgates the rule: "You're allowed one Kai Page Curl per career." It hits home for me because I used a Kai Page Curl as the splash on the top page of my first publicly accessible Web site. Was proud of it, too, in January 1995. (The site is no longer visible, alas.) Now I can never use Page Curl again.
A new user queried the Apple Internet Authoring mailing list for advice on getting the word out about his new Web page. The query drew this detailed and cogent response from Bob Reap <reap@counsel.net>. It's a blueprint for doing the hard work of letting the world know about your site, to the point of diminishing returns.
David Siegel was one of the original students in Donald Knuth's Digital Typography department at Stanford in 1982. He went on to design the ubiquitous Tekton font, among others. His Web Wonk page is exemplary of some of the best advice, and the best design, you're likely to see on the Web today. Bookmark it.
The first dissenting opinion I received on Siegel's work was from Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald.oskoboiny@ualberta.ca> of the HTML Writers Guild:
Siegel is a talented designer, but his Web Wank page has some of the worst advice on HTML that I have ever seen. I cringe every time I think of someone actually taking his advice seriously. I once made a series of screen shots of some of Siegel's sites (alliteration unintentional) with various browsers and window sizes, intending to put them up on a Web page one day to show how bogus his advice really is, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. For links to some good advice on HTML, see http://www.hwg.org/resources/html/style.html. If this was a troll, I apologize.
Next to weigh in was Mathew <meta@harlequin.co.uk>:
David Siegel is a fine book designer, but an incompetent web designer. For instance, he tries to produce justified paragraphs of text by spacing out the words with one-pixel GIFs, stretched to the 'correct' number of pixels. He tries to indent paragraphs by turning the paragraph into individual lines, with a transparent GIF in front of each line of text. Of course, if you don't happen to be using the same graphical browser with exactly the same window size, font size and font, on the same OS platform, his pages look (at best) shoddy and (at worst) like complete garbage. Follow his advice at your peril. He wrote an article about "the balkanization of the web". Ironically, I've never managed to find a browser that would display it readably. (Yes, I tried Netscape.)
Handmade Software sells a software package called Image Alchemy PS. It can translate among more than 80 image formats -- including PostScript -- for PC, Macintosh, Unix, and other systems, and can apply numerous effects -- to control alpha channels, perform gamma correction, control output compression types, set image resolution, scale images based on absolute size, etc. Handmade provides free access to a limited subset of these capabilities. You will need first to FTP your file to their site, then to tell the Web interface the name to which you uploaded it. You can choose from one of 25 output formats with effects such as gamma correction, image size, negative, and sharpen. After conversion your image is returned to your browser if you chose GIF or JPEG format; otherwise you can retrieve it from the FTP site. Image Alchemy is on the Point Survey "Top 5%" list of Web sites.
A similar service is available without using FTP -- for any image visible on the open Internet -- from Visioneering Research Laboratory. This site has the added benefit that it lists other sites offering related services. Several sites will render a GIF image transparent -- here is one that will do so in 10 languages. The MapMaker site generates a map file for any image on the Web. [ The Interactive Graphics Rendering page images lines, icons, etc. with user-chosen attributes and lighting. -- As of 1998-05-04, gone from the Web with a redirector page that points to a page that is not yet live. ]
This document is hosted by Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems Inc. It gives descriptions and subscription information for 25 mailing lists covering Internet security and privacy, including Cypherpunks, Risks, Virus Alert, Privacy Forum, and 8lgm (Eight Little Green Men). Some of the lists are intended for system administrators or security specialists, but the lay reader will find resources for current awareness. The site also lists vendors of security products and other organizations (such as CERT) concerned with security.
This Web page collects over 1500 mailing lists, indexed by name and by subject, from the FAQ posted monthly to the Usenet newsgroup news.lists. Since I last visited, the PAML site has also garnered a Point Top 5% award.
The Scout Report for 1996-03-15 alerted me to the E-mail Discussion Groups/Lists - Resources site. It provides information about using each of the three most commonly encountered software packages for managing email lists: Listserv, Majordomo, and Listproc. There are also links to other mailing-list collections and search engines; my favorite among them is Liszt, which lists over 66,000 mailing lists managed by 2200-plus Internet hosts.
Once you have learned HTML and are using it every day you will want Kevin Werbach's <barebones@werbach.com> guide. It is a concise and complete outline of HTML syntax, and it shows the level of the HTML standard (or Netscape defacto standard) in which each HTML command is included. The BareBones Guide is available as plain text or HTML. The guide has been translated into 23 languages other then English.
For some time I have been meaning to
write a primer covering cryptography and its uses in Net commerce: email
encryption, digital signatures, ecash, non-repudiable transactions, etc.
I have finally decided that I cannot improve on the
introduction to
security topics published in
NetSurfer Focus
last October. It contains copious
links to source material and further information on security, privacy,
anonymity, steganography, etc. You'll also learn about squeamish ossifrages.
Paul E. Hoffman <wwwservers@proper.com> maintains a popular resource (it was visited 13,000 times in November) comparing 42 servers, both freeware and payware, feature by feature in depth. It is invaluable for anyone trying to decide which server will best meet their needs. Hoffman has also performed the best profile I've seen of the servers in use today. He probed a random sample of 2,000 servers culled from more than 23,000 obtained from Yahoo. The results are surprising, and not promising for those companies whose fortunes are tied too closely to the selling of Web servers. Over 78% of the servers in use in August 1995 were freeware. The top 5 servers accounted for 91% of the market: NCSA 54%, CERN 17%, Netscape 8%, Apache 7%, and WebSTAR/MacHTTP 5%.
Where do you go for authoritative advice on Web-site design -- in other words, where is the Web's Chicago Manual of Style, its Joy of Cooking? My nomination is the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media Web Style Manual. This elegant set of pages is self-referentially exemplary, as a good style manual should be. (Anyone remember Fleisch's little classic Type: How to Make It Most Readable?) Yale's Patrick J. Lynch <lynch@biomed.med.yale.edu> is a good designer and a good teacher; his advice has the timelessness of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, and it will still be relevant when we're well into the era of Java-enhanced multimedia pages delivered at 6 Mbps to your screen.
Dave Garaffa's site maintains exhaustive statistics on the flavor of browser used by its visitors (currently more than 30 browsers in more than 140 versions). The site also tracks the features supported by various browsers, lists known and suspected bugs, and conveys "net.fame" on the first person to report each bug.
Yahoo lists ten packages or services to syntax-check and otherwise validate HTML. One of my favorites is the HTML Validation page, a free service of HAL Software (a Fujitsu company). You can type or paste HTML into a form or you can point the validator at any reachable URL. There are options to check against the criteria for HTML 1, 2, 3, "Mozilla" (i.e., Netscape), and HotJava. There is also a check against "Strict" criteria. Nothing I've ever submitted has passed this latter test; I suspect that the Strict subroutine looks something like { return(FALSE); }.
Another favorite is the Kinder, Gentler HTML Validation site, a second-generation validator. This page optionally runs Weblint on a submitted URL.
A new listing is that for Dr. HTML, a Web-page examination tool that performs spelling checks, image analysis, hyperlink verification, and syntax tests, in addition to validating HTML.
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Most recently updated 1998-08-24