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Anime Expo - Sunday - Online Talk
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Behind web pages you'll find the people who make
them, experts in the arcane world of Hypertext Markup Language, Flash,
Javascript and CGI. A group of page designers got together at Anime Expo
on Sunday. From left to right, they're Timothy Georgi of the @Anime online
magazine; Troy Williams of sofaspud.org; David Glenn, who is a Raytheon
programmer when he's not building his fan site, Kane Tung from the Sci-Fi
Channel's Anime Colony site; Jei Harvey of the Anime Web Turnpike; Lionel
Lum, who builds the "Linus Lam" and Anime Expo sites; and Megazone, who
had a hand in the creation of HTML. |
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Real soon now, all of the World-Wide Web is supposed
to graduate from HTML to languages which are supposed to be more advanced
and flexible. Lum isn't interested in the promise of extended markup language
(XML). "I don't like that stuff. I use what is compatible for all browsers,
which isn't XML," Lum said. "I don't think you're going to see XML on browsers
for a few years," Megazone added. "Even Netscape 6 can't handle XML." |
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Macromedia Shockwave and Flash are common multimedia
programming toys, intended to create animation at a relatively low dialup
bandwidth. However, Tung noted that "A lot of people misuse Flash with
a lot of bells and whistles that take 20 minutes to load - no one needs
that. What Flash is for is interfaces and drop-down menus." Tung also dislikes
the kind of multi-media plug-ins that can crash browsers like Netscape. |
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Georgi had a hint for budding webmasters: if you
see a site and wonder how it's assembled, look at the HTML code and learn
how it's made. The programmers said that's how they picked up some of their
techniques (and they admitted that they borrow ideas from each other).
The trick to building an attractive site is to make sure it will load in
all browsers, the programmers said, warning that authoring software such
as Microsoft Front Page generates pages that correctly work only in Internet
Explorer. There were also some bad words for frames, which make navigation
and bookmarking a hard chore. |
