~~amazingly few "Popular Woodworking" readers grab "Vogue" by mistake.

Haha that's just a joke, I don't know anything about art--once I saw Francis Bacon's *Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X* (in person, not in a text book or online like here: http://www.francis-bacon.cx/popes/innocent_X.html) everything else looked "somewhat inauthentic" to me.

But anyway, I didn't come to this party to play art snob, I came to play code snob. So the recurring theme in your laments of late is that you can't make various programs render what you want them to. And the standards bodies aren't much help. That pretty well wraps up the situation we're all up against. You make decisions about how much control to exercise and hope for the best.

My perspective is one of having been involved making web pages since 1994, a more innocent (but not Innocent) time for the world wide web, to be sure. I began by hacking HTML by hand in a text editor, and progressed to the use of various WYSIWYalmostneverG tools fairly rapidly, which only deepened my conviction that the art of writing valid code was a practice that automation utterly fails at.

Anyhow, back a while ago I pontificated extensively about separation of style and content. One of the alleged benefits was this idea about expending the necessary "debug" time getting the code and presentation correct/valid, and adopting that as a template for your various pages. I recall your reaction seemed to suggest you prefer to suit the presentation to the message, and you backed that up with some pages to illustrate how you select fonts, colors and stuff to suit the message.

Anyhow, laziness aside, I reckon there's some artistic rationale for this wacky idea I continue to espouse about separating your style and content. There's more than a few artists of the 20th century who worked to what could be called a template, even if only for a period. A few of those clowns really took it to the extreme (ever see a Jenny Holzer show? wow!). Common style elements that you can factor out of a succession of works, hell, that's what make an artist identifiable. Like I said, I'm no connoisseur, but I can tell when I'm looking at a Roy Liechtenstein painting. Okay, maybe that's a /reductio ad absurdum/, but you get the point--in order for something to have an identifiable visual style you can associate with some artist (or even some poser), there's gotta be some common stylistic approach.

Maybe I'm just too dumb to get what art is about, so let me try a different tack--a crass commercialism in keeping with my American birthright. At every magazine they pay this person called an art director exorbitant sums. For various reasons (and here I know even less about magazine publishing than art, just to be clear), but the thing that stands out is that the art director enforces a common visual style across issues of the magazine. The look changes occasionally, but the idea of visual consistency between issues is so key to periodicals that they pay someone to be the keeper of that style. It wouldn't do for the readers to be unable to pick out "Vogue" from a rack of magazines on offer because there was no identifiable look to it.

So I'm reasonably sure that the art director doesn't have much to do with art. But they're very concerned with distinguishing their publication from the rest of the herd. And with balancing the tension between being utterly unique and being identifiably associated with a community or cause. Even "Car and Driver" or other enthusiast magazines have to use the cover to convey their pitch to the target demographic. And it works--amazingly few "Popular Woodworking" readers grab "Vogue" by mistake.

Please note that I have not uttered the word "branding." There are limits to the crassness even I can endure, despite the dulling of my sensibilities by constant exposure to the output of Madison Avenue. Let's not speak of "positioning" your "brand" with your "target demographic." I feel the need to shower just alluding to it. We can remain on the lofty ramparts of intellectualism, yet still partake of the wholesome probity of a consistent visual idiom. Just like my pal Francis B.

So, the path to web design nirvana is templates. they have to change less often than your content does in order to be useful. But they aren't engraved in stone tablets either. I craft mine /alla prima/ much like a Bacon canvas, but you can pick your approach--embrace the mechanical like Warhol, or go for Rothko-like minimalism. Whatever path you take, just make sure you stick with it a while, so taking the time to make it work well actually makes sense.

So I looked at the beast of a website you sent me, it seems to me like a manual for some programming language (my German is fairly limited, but I can parse "Buffer-Overflows mit all ihren Problemen verhindert"). So I don't exactly know how that relates to the art discussion, or perhaps I failed to perceive some subtlety of your point.

Ironically, the message adjacent yours in my inbox was touting the very wares you suspicioned would assuage your web publishing pain. Plus a couple other pharmaceutical products to stiffen your "resolve." I can't offer anything stronger than the soothing words of a sympathetic spirit, so I'm guessing that the Bayesian filters of the world should weigh my message in the balance, and not finding it wanting, expedite it to its somewhat distressed intended recipient.

all the best,
Rob

Sometimes computer geeks know more about art than artists about computers and who is the nerd is then easy to decide. Who has communicated better here? It is our Robert 'linear' Arnold at his very best above, further fortifying his reputation as an inspired writer gained in my defunct blog "CB's fireplace".

At the risk of making this blog post too long and me looking too "unresolved", may I quote the email message I had sent to Rob with the subject line "Whew! And shit!" and which had triggered the above perceptive and perceptible lines? Here they are (they were not meant for publication, but they will at least inform you about some things going on at "CB's castle" [will this be my new blog?]):

Dear Rob,

I just took my German website ( www.butterbach.de ) offline. I could not stand it anymore. I was again ready to kill myself. The situation had become so bad that even with taking the latest post off the blog, the rest of the blog was completely destroyed.

This is a pity, because my few latest posts on the German site were very good and goodlooking and had gotten positive reactions. Also, lately the number of my German visitors has surpassed all the others which had never been the case. I do not know how many of these go to the German site or to the English one, nevertheless it is a sign that I should care for my German site and I have lately been much more enthusiastic about it, so the quality became better. And just now when I want to add this announcement for an artistic event (see the attached picture which is part of it), this happens. And I wanted to do something _today_ for Hans-Joachim Führer, the son of Silvio Gesell (and Jenny Blumenthal) who becomes 90 today. I would have been well placed to make something nice out of it for my audience, as I have met him personally, when he was still younger (under 50), and other members of his family. But it is not possible under those dreary circumstances.

So I tried to find out what was behind this code I got and used and transformed. Though nothing could be seen offhand from the point of view of simple HTML 4, W3C validator discovered more faults than were signs in it. That was for my various versions. Then I tried the code received, the part I had taken over as well as the whole source code delivered by Eudora. Even worse. So the fault [was] not that much on my part. Then I got the idea to have a look at the artist's website (most of those artists in that network of artists I know well have rather nicely done, professional websites), as a link to it was in the text I wanted to publish. I had not yet and never before visited it. I can tell you: nothing but a catastrophe... On all counts. See for yourself: www.hierundda.de. Too bad that you do not understand German, you would not believe what is on the page and in the code.
Can you imagine, such a site sends cookies, and illegal ones. She dared to send me something like that. Maybe there is a bad intention behind all that, not just silliness. We have been on best terms for years, but some of the people in that circle maybe wanted to take a revenge because of what I had said in a recent post about artists, who knows...

This is a lesson. But I am took weak, I never succeed in keeping my stance to not accept ready code and create my own instead. Till when the problems are there already. I have never real problems with the one, very modest, I create myself, or if there are, they are minor and I can solve them quickly.

These people never send you a TXT or RTF or good HTML file. They always send you (be it done on a Mac or a Windows machine, more often a Mac) something done with a word processor and looking great and tempting. They are artist[s] after all. Then I want to stay faithful to their design (it takes too much time to reproduce it with other means, if at all possible), take over some code and I am in the trap. Those people do not understand that one cannot create decent code for a website with a word processor, unless one uses only the plain text functions, like with an HTML editor, but that these people don't know. I should know, but I always fall for the striking and colourful design those people use in their announcements and invitations.

Help me by giving me a beating for doing that.

Whoever invented web publishing must also have invented Valium. I am sure that Tim Berners-Lee holds majority stock in the production of Valium. ;-)

And this word Valium and links and UPPER CASE letters may land my message into your or your provider's spam filter. Therefore I am sending it with Return Receipt.

Whew!

I am not finished. I had asked permission to publish the above lines by linear the following way:

Dear, dear Rob,

Thank you so much!!! That message was such a delight, you are a great, great writer, you are too good to waste your talent on drab code. :-) It is a pity that "CB's fireplace" is defunct, it would have been the right post for it. But I am still thinking of replacing it (it's announced already!) by one or several quality blogs. And I am also considering those long planned improvements with the blogging software etc., now after this experience with that German blog which made me close my site, as I cannot stand it that people look at that design shit that had resulted. But right now I absolutely want to post this marvellous exposé into my "CB's notewok" under the heading "amazingly few "Popular Woodworking" readers grab "Vogue" by mistake". This will become a hit. With my Vogue reading audience... ;-) Please do not refuse your authorization or you would give me the final stab to death. I could add the coffee cup picture as an illustration, it's being discussed after all! :-)

I have to leave now for an appointment. TTYL

His answer:

So you want to get your "artist" pals angry at me too, eh? Go ahead, I can handle the worst cookies they can dish out.

I won't publish the Return Receipt though (it came double, that's resolve!)! You mustn't know everything after all... ;-) There is always more in my email and in my life than on my sites... ;-)