Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Sep 14 '00
There have been plenty of editorials explaining various ways to add "enhancements" to your profile page or to the text of your reviews, some of them implying that this is the sort of thing you need to do to show a "personality" around here. This is, in a sense, a dissenting viewpoint. I'm here to argue that sometimes simpler is better. One of my favorite mottoes is "Keep it simple, stupid!" Too many people are so eager to make things look fancy that they go overboard in using every "snazzy" feature they can find, whether they fully understand how it works or not, and they can end up causing unanticipated problems. Am I arguing here that everybody should use nothing but plain text? Not really. Enhanced features can be used to good effect if you're careful about it. (The italicized word in the last sentence, for instance.) But, if you're not sure you know what you're doing, it's best to stick to a simpler approach; it may come out looking more "boring," but at least you know it will work for everybody.
HTML Tags:
Most of the "fancy" vs. "plain" issues concern the use of HTML. Epinions has allowed HTML code to be inserted in profile pages, and this is heavily used and abused by members. Various tutorials have been posted here to try to explain how to use them. They're well-intentioned, but they usually take a misguided approach. The attitude is what I refer to as "Tag Soup." This is the belief that HTML consists of a bunch of "commands" that make the browser "do things" as they're encountered. Thus, when the browser gets to {B} (Note: Replace curly brackets with angle brackets; I had to write them this way to keep them from being interpreted as HTML here.) it "turns on bold-face mode," when it gets to {I} it "turns on italic mode," when it gets to {/B} it "turns off bold mode," etc.
This isn't how HTML really works. Actually, HTML is a structured markup language with elements which must be properly nested. {B} and {/B} act as delimiters marking an element that is to be regarded as bold text, and {I} and {/I} similarly mark an element to be regarded as italic. If the two are nested, one must be entirely contained within the other. "Tag Soup" authors don't understand this, and sometimes try to write things like: {B}This is bold {I}and this is italic,{/B} but what is this?{/I} This is improper nesting, and is likely to have unpredictable results on different browsers.
Another "Tag Soup" concept that's frequently advocated in Epinions "tutorial" editorials is the use of the <BODY> tag. The way people talk about it here, you'd think <BODY BACKGROUND="…"> was a "command" that said "Set the page background to so-and-so." It isn't. Actually, <BODY> is one of the structured elements of an HTML document; the entire main body of a Web page is contained within the BODY element, starting with <BODY> and ending with </BODY>. There is only supposed to be one BODY element in a Web page, and there is not supposed to be any "body content" outside the BODY element (there is other content like the page title that is supposed to be outside that element). There are optional presentational attributes such as BACKGROUND which can be added to the BODY tag to control such aspects as the background graphic. (These attributes are deprecated in the latest HTML specification in favor of the use of stylesheets.)
Since Epinions already has a BODY element in the page HTML code it generates (into which it inserts your own code for your profile page), it's not valid for you to type one in. When you do so, it is only as a result of browser bugs, misfeatures, or error correction rules that your tag actually has the intended effect of setting a background. It may well fail to do so in other browser versions. A little history lesson: Way back when Netscape 1.1 came out in 1995, it had the "feature" that when a Web author used multiple BODY tags with different color attributes, this caused a "cool" animation effect where the browser cycled through all the colors in order. Lots of authors did this, but when Netscape 2.0 came out this suddenly stopped working; it turned out that it was just a browser bug in the first place. Many pages ended up unreadable as the new Netscape just used the color of the first BODY tag, which was sometimes "black-on-black" in the "artsy" animated pages. Extra BODY tags with background graphics seem to work right now, but might fail as spectacularly in the future.
There are many more issues raised by HTML code. There is the browser compatibility issue; do you know which tags are standard ones supported by all browsers and which are vendor-specific "enhancements" that only work in one brand? For instance, <MARQUEE> only works in MSIE, while <BLINK> only works in Netscape. You can find the official HTML specifications at www.w3.org; that's the authoritative reference for which tags are actually standard.
Even if you avoid browser-specific tags, you can have compatibility problems if you use tags in a nonstandard way. I've already discussed nesting rules a little; there are quite a few rules about what tags are allowed to be nested within which other tags, and what elements are only allowed in particular contexts. Breaking these rules can produce code that works in one browser but not another. For instance, I ran into one profile page that seemed, in my Netscape browser, to have big blank spaces where the headers implied that things like links to his favorite reviewers should be. I looked at the HTML code, and found that these links were done as <INPUT TYPE="button"> elements. The INPUT element is only valid in HTML as part of a <FORM> element, and none was used by this author. Apparently MSIE lets authors get away with this, but Netscape doesn't; it just ignores these form-less inputs.
Try running your profile page through a validator, like validator.w3.org. You may be shocked at how many syntax errors are reported. (Some of them are out of your control, in the code generated by Epinions themselves, but others may be in the code you put in and can fix.)
I should also note that Epinions may mangle your code a little, too. Epinions will put <BR> tags everywhere you press Enter, which is OK for plain-text (though I'd prefer it if the more structured <P> element was used to delineate paragraphs), but can result in a messup when it gets inserted within HTML code such as tables. Another Epinions author wanted to know why there were so many awkward large blank spaces in his profile; the cause was the <BR> tags stuck between rows of a table, a syntactically invalid place (table content must be within <TR> and <TD> elements, not between them) which causes some browser versions to save up all those line breaks and put them at the end (or the beginning) of the table.
The lesson in all of this is to be careful what you do with HTML. Don't feel bad about using plain text instead of HTML, or using simple HTML instead of more complicated and convoluted stuff, if you're not sure you understand all the syntax and compatibility issues of the more complicated code. And, if you do want to get fancier, be sure to study how to do it right. Don't trust every tutorial you read. Get a good HTML book, or read a wide variety of online documentation, and get a good grounding in the proper syntax of HTML and in which tags and elements are standard and which are browser-specific. I have a page of Web tips myself: http://www.dantobias.com/webtips/
In your opinion articles themselves, you're much more limited in the HTML you can use than in the profiles. This can be frustrating (I wish I could use hyperlinks, as well as more logically and semantically correct tags like <CITE> for citations of titles rather than the generic italic element), but it also restrains writers from the more egregious excesses. There's much less damage you can do with just the {B} and {I} tags. Still, be sure to nest them correctly, and don't over-use them; use boldfacing and italics for emphasis, but don't boldface or italicize your whole article, as this makes their emphasizing use meaningless. Also, don't put HTML tags in the title, because when the title is displayed in the browser's top bar while you're reading an article, the tags come out as raw code, which looks silly. Also, when your article is sent to other users in e-mail notifications, any HTML tags in the title and opening sentence of the article will show up as raw code in the plain-text e-mail message (except for AOL users, whose standards-noncompliant mail program interprets HTML tags, going against all the principles of how e-mail is supposed to be rendered). Thus, you should probably avoid HTML in the opening line of your article as well as in the title.
JavaScript:
Much of the "fancy" HTML used in profile pages makes use of JavaScript code. Those <INPUT TYPE="button"> elements used in place of plain hyperlinks work only through the use of JavaScript, as do various other ways of providing navigation controls such as pull-down menus. This is problematic; many users disable JavaScript for security reasons or to prevent annoying pop-up windows that some Web sites use. These users won't be able to use your navigation controls at all. There are also many compatibility problems with the different implementations of JavaScript in different browser versions; even professional developers like myself have to scratch our heads about them sometimes. It's better to "keep it simple, stupid" by just using plain {A HREF="…"} hyperlinks; those work for everybody.
Plug-Ins, Applets, Embeds, …:
One of my biggest turn-offs when entering a profile page is when the browser presents me with the status line: "Loading Plug-In…" or "Starting Applet…". Netscape tends to take a lengthy coffee break at this point, during which the STOP and BACK buttons don't even work, so I'm forced to endure the wait while whatever fancy effect the author inserted finishes loading and running. Sometimes all I'm rewarded with at the end of this is a dialog box telling me that I don't actually have the correct plug-in version to handle whatever content is there.
Usually you can do without this sort of thing. Do you really need to have background music on the page? Some people are already playing a CD on their computer and don't want their speakers taken over, or they're using a computer near others trying to work, study, or sleep. If you have some cool sound, video, or other multimedia files, put plain hyperlinks to them on your page, so that interested people can click on them if they want to see or hear them. Don't assault unwary users with them directly on your profile.
Graphics:
I wrote an earlier opinion about the prevalence of broken images in profiles; you can read it at:
http://dtobias.epinions.com/user-review-5462-DDDD2F7-396CF8B3-prod3
Pictures can be a nice addition to your profile, but be careful that the images you use actually work, and also don't go overboard in making your page take too long to load. If your images are hosted by a free server like Geocities, it may be really slow at times, so limit the number and size of images you use to keep it from really dragging down the load time. Size the images appropriately; don't just use WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes to re-scale a larger image down to size, as the whole thing still has to be loaded. Resize it in your own graphic editor before putting it on the Web. But do still use the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes in your <IMG> tags to specify the actual size of the image; pages render more quickly if you do, as the browser doesn't have to wait for the image to load before laying out the rest of the page. Also use the ALT attribute in your <IMG> tags, to provide alternative content for non-graphical users.
Nonstandard Characters:
Did you know that some commonly-used characters are nonstandard and can cause problems? The characters from #128 through #159 are not part of the standard platform-independent character sets that are supposed to be used within Internet documents; those code positions are reserved in the standard for control characters and other platform-specific stuff. Microsoft has chosen to put various nonstandard things there, including curly quotes and apostrophes, "em-dashes", etc. Of course, since these are Microsoftisms, their own software like MS-Word will merrily insert them in your documents, even when you type normal things like straight quotes, apostrophes, and hyphens. When you put these in your articles and profile pages, they may show up as garbage for users of other platforms such as the Macintosh, Unix, or Linux. Some browsers on those platforms may kneel down and kiss Bill Gates' butt by displaying these characters "correctly", but others don't. Also, when the titles and opening lines of your articles are sent in e-mail alerts, different mail readers (even on the Windows platform) may or may not display the characters correctly. I myself often paste these e-mails into the Ultra-Edit text editor (where I can globally-replace http://www.epinions.com with my affiliate subdomain instead so I get ad-banner credit at least until the end of this month when self-surfing no longer counts), and find that this program displays these nonstandard characters as black rectangles. So ensure the compatibility and readability of your text by using only standard characters like the upright quote ("). If you compose your articles in MS-Word (as I sometimes do myself), you can go to the Tools menu under Auto-Correct and uncheck the boxes that tell that program to replace your quotes and dashes with nonstandard (so-called "smart") characters.
Though they're standard, I suggest you avoid using even plain-ASCII quotes (") in the title of your articles. The reason for this is that Epinions (unnecessarily) replaces them with an HTML entity reference, which displays fine in browsers, but shows up as ugly raw code in e-mail notifications. So avoid quotes in the title (and in the first sentence of your article) if you don't want this sort of ugliness.
Incidentally, the accented letters used in Western European languages are perfectly standard, and there's no problem using them if you wish to write en español or en français. (However, if you're composing your article on a non-Windows platform, like the Mac or DOS text mode, be sure the characters are saved in the standard ISO-Latin-1 positions, which agree with Windows standard encoding but not all other platforms.)
The 'Interests' Section of Profiles:
As many of you are aware, the "Interests" section of your profile is displayed to the left of all of your opinions, as well as appearing on the profile itself. As far as I can tell, the intended use of this section was for a brief list of your interests, either as a bunch of things separated by commas ("Tennis, chess, hog-calling") or a couple of brief sentences. But some of you seem to want to write a novel there, or at least a long essay. This comes out really awkward at the left edge of opinions; there, all HTML tags are stripped out and the whole thing is presented as a big, run-on paragraph in small type. Nobody is going to read a lengthy dissertation in that format, and it only annoys people by making them have to scroll down further to get to the list of ratings beneath it. So keep it short, and don't rely on HTML tags in that section. I've also written before on the perils of having long strings without spaces that shove everything else out to the right; you can read this at:
http://dtobias.epinions.com/user-review-185-3A98E82-39AF107F-prod1
Disabling Standard Profile Features:
Some of you think that it's "artsy" to take advantage of the features that let you disable some of the normal content of the profile page, like the section to the left that shows your trust list. The trouble with that is that if you monkey with the usual profile format, it creates usability problems. For instance, if you remove the trust lists, Epinions also takes away the standard buttons that let you trust or distrust the user, which are normally along the left edge. Some users make up for this by coming up with their own hyperlinks or form buttons to do the same thing, but they're in nonstandard positions that can be hard to find. I've actually been to users' profiles where I wanted to trust them but couldn't find the button to do so, and hence didn't. It may be boring to let the profile page stay in the standard layout, but at least people will know where to find things.
Conclusion:
It can, unfortunately, get pretty complicated to "Keep it simple, stupid!" these days, since you sometimes have to fight your own software which keeps trying to do things more complicatedly and problematically. But you're still best off doing things at the most plain-vanilla level unless you really know what you're doing when you add well-chosen enhancements.
Contrary to the implications of some editorials, you can show plenty of personality with just plain text!
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
dtobias
|
 - Top 1000 |
|
Member: Daniel Tobias
Location: Boca Raton, FL
Reviews written: 167
Trusted by: 94 members
About Me:
A programmer and Internet developer who's been a "computer geek" for over 20 years now.
|
|
|
© 1999-2008 Shopping.com, Inc.