You have surely already noticed that this site does not contain a lot of fancy code. There's no frames, no Javascript (I hope to add a hitcounter, but that won't affect anybody's ability to access the site), no fancy backgrounds, and very, very few graphics. Besides the photo gallery and the very front index page, there are no graphics or pictures. This is not because I don't know how to add those things, or because I'm too lazy to do so. It's because I don't like them.
When I first started using the Internet (1989), the WWW didn't exist. A 9600 baud modem was considered screaming fast (2400 was the standard), and downloading a 600k file was something you set your computer to do overnight, while you slept. There were no graphical interfaces, no internet advertising, no America Online (this was the good ol' days). If you wanted information, chances are you could ask somebody and get an intelligent answer. Most informational papers were available via a system called Gopher, which was a very straightforward, hierarchal menu system, a bit like using Lynx to browse the web, but more readable. Since it was ALL like this, it didn't matter whether you were using a fast (50MHz!) Sun workstation or a dumb-terminal that didn't even have a hard drive, you could ALWAYS get the information, if it was available at all.
These days, if you don't have a 500GHz Pentium VII MMCIXVQ, running MS Explorer 2010 or Netscape version 74.05, loaded with the latest Zippety-Do-Da-QPEG-8-Animation plugin, running off a direct T3 connection, then forget it pal, you're behind the times; don't even THINK about trying to access half the sites on the net.
This site is designed with UNIVERSAL ACCESS in mind. Ideally, you should be able to look at every page on this site using a text-based browser (such as Lynx), a PDA (Newton, Pilot, etc.), or with the slowest 8086 PC and a 300-baud modem. You don't need Java, you don't need frames, you don't need the latest version of any kind of software. All you need is some connection -- ANY connection -- to the net. I have not had a chance to check every single page with Lynx or my Newton, so if you find a page that doesn't work with your browser, please let me know. If my page isn't fancy enough for you, well, tough luck. It exists to inform, not to impress.
If the main index takes too long to load, try turning off image autoloading.
I hope you enjoy this site. If you have any comments, criticisms or suggestions, go ahead and email me.
David Weingarten
cfool@elevatedloc.com
http://www.elevatedloc.com/cfool/