The rest of the Lexington Symphony Web site is devoted to the orchestra. This page, on the other hand, tells a little about the site itself.
I make the apparently revolutionary assumption that you have come to this site to read it. I say "apparently revolutionary" because many Web sites seem to be designed to be watched rather than read.
I have tried to give the site a bit of style, but I have tried to keep the style from getting in your way as you read. Most of your screen is devoted to the information I hope you came for, and little is devoted to making the site look better. I have kept images to a minimum, and I have tried to make sure the pages load reasonably quickly, even with a slow connection.
Browser-Independence and Accessibility
This site should be at its best with any modern standards-based Web browser, and it should work reasonably well with any browser at all. (The World Wide Web was designed using open standards from the beginning, so there is no excuse for Web sites designed for a specific browser.)
I use Cascading Style Sheets to give the site a little style without compromising accessibility for people with disabilities, people with dialup connections, or people using minimal browsers in cell phones and PDAs. This site does not depend on style sheets, so your browser can safely ignore them. You'll miss the style, but not the substance.
To make sure this site complies with relevant standards, I validate it against XHTML 1.0 and the style sheet against the W3C CSS Validator.
The browsers I test with include:
- the excellent, free, open-source Mozilla Firefox browser;
- the excellent, free, open-source, text-based Lynx browser;
- the atrocious browser in my cell phone, both to push the limits of the site's accessibility and, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, just because I can; and
- because so many people still seem to use it despite its security vulnerabilities and poor standards compliance, Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The Web Is Not TV!
How many times have you visited a Web site only to have to wait for minutes for some stupid animation to download and do its thing? Finally, after the song and dance, the site allows you to visit the link you wanted to visit in the first place. If you are lucky, there won't be another animation on the next page.
TV viewers are expected to watch passively while the TV does the work. But when those same people use their Web browsers, they are are usually actively seeking something. They do not want to sit passively and wait for some stupid animation. They will lose patience fairly quickly, and are less likely to return, if they are not rewarded with what they were looking for.
In addition, flashy animations reduce accessibilty. A screen reader for the visually impaired, for example, or a text-oriented browser on a cell phone, can't do anything with an animation.
Of course there is a place for multimedia on a Web site: when the multimedia is part of the content! I am planning to put some sound clips of the Lexington Symphony in a corner of this site, for example. But you won't find any Flash or Shockwave gizmos here to make the site less accessible, slower, and more annoying. I will not try to lull you into watching this site.
The Web Is Not Paper!
Many Web designers come from the world of paper. In that world, one is forced to make the same choices (font, font size, paper size, layout, etc.) for all readers. It is possible, but wrong, to take that perspective when designing for the Web. Such designers only care whether their sites look good using one or two Web browsers using default settings. Many users also use their Web browsers that way, letting Web designers and their browser defaults determine their experience, partly because they aren't aware of the alternatives and partly because so many designers have made it so difficult to read their sites any other way.
But one thing that the Web has over paper is that on the Web, you (not the designer) are in charge of how your browser renders the page and even which browser you use. As a site designer, I assume you can make those choices for yourself better than I can, so I try to respect choices you have made.
Font Size
For example, with most browsers you can easily change your browser's default font or font size. How you do this is not standardized between browsers, but usually you can do this by bringing up the browser's "edit", "tools", or "view" menu and making a menu choice like "fonts" or "text size". Some browsers, like Mozilla, also offer keyboard shortcuts like holding down the ctrl key and hitting the + or - keys to enlarge or shrink the text size. If you have trouble reading small text, try making the font bigger; if you want to see more of a site without scrolling, try making the font smaller. Unfortunately, paper-oriented Web designers often subvert your choices in a misguided effort to make their sites look right (to them). On those sites, your font choices may have no effect or your choices will make these pages unreadable. I have tried to make sure that this is not one of those sites. Try changing your font or font size and see!
Some proponents of Web accessibility suggest that designers offer users a choice of font sizes. This is preposterous. What sizes should we offer? Some users just want something a bit smaller or larger than usual; others need huge fonts; and many need something in between. Besides, these users would have to make that choice again and again for each site that offered the choice, and would be out of luck for sites that don't. No, font size should between the user and his or her browser. The user should only have to make that choice once and Web designers just need to get out of the way.
Browser Window Size
You can also try dragging the sides or corners of your browser window to change its size. You can make your browser window smaller to expose more of your desktop, or make it larger to see more of the Web page without scrolling. Many Web sites force you to use the dreaded horizontal scroll bar if your browser window is not wide enough for the designer's taste. This means you have to scroll back and forth to read every line! Who needs that?
While a horizontal scrollbar on a Web page is usually a bad thing (unless the page has real two-dimensional information like a large graphic image or table) a vertical scrollbar is goodness and light. The paper mentality, especially when combined with irrational fear of vertical scrollbars, can lead to the bizarre notion that a Web page should represent a physical page. You'll often find that you have to follow "next page" and "previous page" links just to read a single article, and if your browser's window is smaller than the designer had intended, you'll need a scrollbar anyway and you'll find you have to do a complicated dance involving your scrollbar and the next/previous links just to read it. It would have been much better for the designer to have put the whole article on a single Web page, and let your browser, which knows your current window size, handle the scrolling. Perhaps "Web page" is an unfortunate term; perhaps "Web article", "Web chapter" or "Web node" would have been better. Whatever we call it, a Web page should represent a unit of information (e.g. article, chapter, section) not the designer's fantasy browser window size.
Images
Most browsers may be configured to prevent images from loading. This can be especially nice if you have a slow dialup connection, because images usually take much more time to download than the text you probably came for. Sadly, most sites these days are completely unusable with images turned off, because these sites depend on the images to convey information (even purely textual information) or to control the layout. Such sites are particularly inaccessible to the visually impaired; images are not as easily resized as text and cannot be read by text-to-speech synthesizers. On this site, if you turn off images you'll find you're missing very little.
Respecting Defaults
I have tried to respect your browser defaults even at the expense of style. Blue and purple underlined hotlinks are not particularly beautiful, but if that is what you are accustomed to, why should I change them?
If I respect your defaults, you can find links just by looking and you can easily see which links you've already visited. You don't have to scrape the page with your mouse to find hidden links. (I do have some links "hidden" behind images for stylistic reasons, but only if there's also an explicit, visible link to the same place somewhere else.)
On the other hand, the W3C makes a good case against some of the above argument, so I'm mulling a change.
More Crimes I Have Not Committed
You are not imprisoned here; your browser's back button should work throughout. I've tried to make this site a good citizen of the Web by also including links to other sites where appropriate. I hope you'll stay awhile, but you are free to go! There is no "click to enter" button on the home page that admits, by its mere presence, that the author knew the home page was useless. There's no JavaScript here to make the site slower, more inaccessible, less useful, and more annoying. (To be fair, sometimes JavaScript can actually speed up a Web site, but it still reduces accessibility.) And of course there are no popups.
You're welcome.
Join Us!
It is remarkable to me how few Web designers even make an attempt to adhere to some of these simple principles. I suppose that's because it's easy to see that a Web site looks right (using a particular browser with particular settings) but it's harder to see that a Web site is structured right, so that it will look right for all browsers at all settings. But I do find some kindred spirits, including Cari Burstein of the Viewable With Any Browser campaign, open-source proponent Eric Raymond, and of course the World Wide Web Consortium itself. If you're a Web designer or if you have any influence over one, maybe you'll join us!
Open-Source Tools
Most of the tools I use in development of this site are free and open-source. I have already mentioned Mozilla Firefox and Lynx, two very different open-source Web browsers. I use the Ubuntu and Fedora distributions of the Linux operating system, which includes numerous indispensable tools from the GNU Project. To edit the pages, I use the GNU Emacs text editor. I do not use a WYSIWYG HTML editor, partially because WYSIWYG is impossible for a well designed Web page that cedes some control to the reader, partially because I don't want to be lulled into a paper mindset, and partially because I simply haven't bothered to learn to use one. I use The GIMP for image manipulation. This site is hosted by Dreamhost, which uses the Debian distribution of Linux.
Thank You
I hope I've given you some idea of why I designed this site as I did. If you're a Web user, I hope I've encouraged you to experiment with your browser settings and even try a new browser. If you're a Web designer, I hope I've encouraged you to rethink your own design.
I'd love to hear from you if any of this makes a difference to you. Also please let me know if you have a suggestion or if anything on this site needs improvement or needs fixing. Thank you!
Credits
Most photos by Pierre Chiha. Musical instrument closeup photos © Alice M. Hughey. Photos of the Stefan Jackiw rehearsal by Jim Fesler. Publicity photos courtesy of the performers.
Jon Dreyer (home page)
