Some notes about Html

Some years ago I taught myself some basic HTML. I'm still stuck somewhere at level 2, but it does for my purposes. This entire site has been written with Apple's "Simpletext" editor, using various browsers to check my work as I go along. I have tried to make the site both fun and accessible, and have tried to make it an artistic experience without a lot of flashy effects which may or may not work for everybody. I have avoided the use of frames (which I don't understand) and anything which moves (apart from a couple of animated gifs nicked from other sites!). I'm not sure what a style-sheet is, so I don't miss them much.

I have fallen very much in love with Image maps, which I think most browsers support happily these days, even though a lot of people don't use them. They are simple and effective, and can be changed easily by re-writing numbers in the code. As a visual artist I regard my computer as just another artistic medium, like my watercolour and oils sets, my scissors, and my pencils. Html is the support on which I paint my pictures.

I have also made a lot of use of tables, although they often simply provide a neat frame to each picture. A one box table! Like a physical frame around a painting in a gallery, they enlarge the picture without enlarging... that is, in the virtual gallery, they enlarge the picture without increasing download times. My biggest experiment with tables I called "Html chocolate". This was an attempt to create an artwork without any downloadable image at all, which therefore appears instantly in even the slowest of browsers! It is a series of tables within tables, each containing a single letter "M" (the nearest I could get to a square letter) written in chocolate brown on a chocolate background. It looks best in Explorer, for some reason later versions of Netscape don't display the border colours properly, leaving it white and brown in patches.

I do keep meaning to learn some more up-to-date HTML, but on the other hand the medium seems to me to be perfectly formed just the way it is. Simple enough for even artists to understand, it provides me with a perfect art gallery all of my own!

[ Have some chocolate! ]

The Roving Artist & Co

Charles' Art Gallery