FRIENDS, since the dawn of the Internet, man has dreamed of a day when animated dancing Jesus' were not the limit of multimedia on the web, and this is unfortunate as all hell. When this web site was originally created and uploaded onto the Internet, it was 1996 and it appeared on America Online [1]. Aside from writing the copy, I had little to do with its creation and design; Ken West and Jeof Vita kindly took it upon themselves to do so, since I didn't know anything about the Internet or computers or what have you. They did a fine job, and I remain indebted to them. Since then, I have learned a lot, and now I administer this web site all by my lonesome, which probably explains the dropoff in traffic from those heady days. Along with gaining practical knowledge, like how to get a Favorite icon in MSIE 5+ or a customized 404 page, I have also developed a well-defined philosophy of Web Design. This should come as no surprise to anyone, since I have well-defined philosophies of just about everything, and generally generate new philosophies in an average of ten minutes. Mention something to me, anything, and within ten minutes I will have a philosophy about it. It's the one gift God gave me.
    My philosophy of Web Design is simple: simplicity. The single greatest asset of the Internet (assuming evil corporations don't succeed in making it into an opaque consumerist nightmare) is its openness, its standardization, the fact that HTML is renderable on any program designed to read it. No licensing fees, no proprietary formats. It doesn't care what kind of computer you use, or how much RAM you have. A nice simple, clean web page will show up fine on Netscape, MSIE, Opera, Lynx, Arachne - whatever. I try to keep my web pages simple: some graphics, a few tables, lots of text. I think this is what the Internet is best used for.
    Unfortunately, no one seems to agree with me. To prove this point, I need only three words: streaming, flash, and webcast.
    You know what those words spell? Television, that's what. The Internet is a wonderful rich-text and graphic delivery system, a graceful information depository. What it is not and won't be for quite some time is: television. But that doesn't stop the corporate motherfuckers from deciding that's what we want. Do we? I don't know, man; we already have television. And most of it sucks.
    That doesn't stop people from wanting more from their Internet connections. This is not necessarily a new thing. There was a time when there were no graphics on the Internet, no GIFs, no <blink> tags - and you know what people did? ASCII art. Pictures of things created from the ASCII text table. The question of what kind of brain-damaged fanboy spend 16 hours making an ASCII picture of Darth Vader (the answer, of course, is easy: Jeof Vita) aside, the point is that people have always been pushing for the Internet to get more TV-like. Today, we have Flash to provide annoying animated sites. We have streaming video, webcasts, webcams, all sorts of bells and whistles and chrome. The idea being, I guess, that the sooner we can get free porn videos streamed nicely on our PCs, the sooner we can nip this resurgence of literateness and written communication spurred on by the Internet and get back to passive sopping up images and sounds fed to us by the corporate motherfuckers.
    The problem with all this is two-fold. One, the Internet is not ready for it. Even those of us blessed with large bandwidth find streamed video on the Internet to be choppy, fuzzy, and small. I personally won't even bother with any web page that has a mandatory Flash intro, even at work where I have a fast connection and can grin and bear them without too much trouble. The simple fact is that even if everyone in the world got at least a DSL line, the Internet would still be a third-rate TV experience due to technical limitations. Maybe when Internet 2 kicks in, we'll be ready. Maybe not. Two, and more importantly, it isn't what the Internet was meant for. We have television - why invent it again? The Internet and the Web were created by scientists to transmit information, and that remains what the Internet is best at [2].
    Will a time come when technology allows us to combine TV and the Internet into a big Content-On-Demand smorgasbord of wasted time? Yes, of course. One day you'll be able to slip on your standard-issue jumpsuit, eat a bowl of Soylent Green, and order up any movie, TV show, music video, encyclopedia entry, newspaper, or book you wish onto the wall-sized TV screen that never shuts off. Whether this will be a paradise of freely-available information or a hell of corporate motherfucking proprietariness remains to be seen, of course, but it is a few years away yet. In the mean time, I keep these web pages pretty much text based with a moderate amount of tabling and graphics for two reasons: one, I don't know how to do Flash or any of that funky stuff, and two, I just think this is why you're here. 
    Web sites that love all that animations and slick bullshit are mostly, I think, corporate motherfucker sites, web sites that have a hand in your pants the moment you click your way to them. Web sites that merely (merely!) have something to say, some information to impart, are generally more text-based and have little use for multimedia bullshit, and I think that's as it should be. If you want to put on a television show, friends, put it on television. There's always public access.

TOP FIVE GREETING MESSAGES FROM YOUR WALL-SIZED TV THAT NEVER SHUTS OFF: 5. "Citizen 35522! Commence mandatory calisthenics!" 4. "Good morning! Now: back to work, maggot." 3. "Please report immediately to the Soylent Green Processing Plant downstairs for...breakfast." 2. "Keep your leg chains in full view at all times, human slave, or Korak will have to beat you again." 1. "You are not authorized to be awake now. Please present a vein for sedatives"

OF COURSE, maybe there's the point, eh? Putting on a TV show can be an expensive proposition if you expect anyone at all to actually watch it. The airwaves are controlled by a few corporations - who will air your show? One of nine corporations, most likely, and why should they bother? Even if you manage to get your show onto the air, most likely it won't be a personal project you can micromanage and have fun with. It'll be a nightmare of corporate motherfuckery. So maybe the inappropriateness of the Internet for TV-like media isn't the point. Maybe the point is the fact that any with a PC and a decent Internet connection can put up content without waiting for some corporation to green light them. No matter how crude they are, you get video, audio, text, graphics, and even ratings (hit counts) and ad revenue. Maybe the whole point is, the Internet could be the poor man's television station.     Let's face it, most entertainment, most artistic endeavors, suck. If you think otherwise you just have bad taste: television, movies, books, paintings, music - most of it is really, really bad. One reason for this just has to be the corporate motherfuckery which lies behind most artistic endeavors, most entertainment, which treats such things as merchandise, as units. How can you have good music when it's all viewed as product to be pushed into the open maw of the undiscriminating public?    Now imagine that instead of corporate funding, most artistic endeavors could be funded, created, and distributed by normal human beings like you and me. No more corporate motherfuckery - just honest people transmitting honestly intended programming to interested people. To a small extent, that's what the Internet is. Think of it as history's most inconvenient text-delivery system, and there you have it: millions of people every day bypass traditional publishers to deliver their words directly to readers. Sometimes for free, sometimes for ad money, sometimes for subscription - who cares? The point is the Internet

allows people to bypass that corporate layer that fucks everything up. If the video and audio capabilities of the Internet reach the quality of television, imagine being able to shoot, edit, mix, and distribute your own movies for tiny amounts of money, and then just leave them on servers for download for years? Overnight, the corporate dinosaurs which leave behind such droppings as "Exit Wounds" or "Scary Movie" would dry up, leaving in their wake millions of choices.
    Then again: I've perused a lot of web pages, and most of them are crap. Maybe there's no winning, only gradations of losing.
    No matter what, I won't be at the party. Even when animating my avatar becomes ridiculously easy, I'll still be putting up lame text-mostly pages on this site, and also probably watching my hit counts drop like stones, glumly tasting the muzzle of my gun, my only friend. I don't want to make television.

    New column in about two weeks. In the meantime, please feel free to drop me a note.