Paragraphic? Huh?
I know it’s not a real word, but the (hardly cryptic) marriage of the actual words ‘paragraph’ and ‘graphic’ seemed not only to sum up my interests and talents, but also encapsulate the sort of nonsense I intended to post online. Add to that reasoning the not-inconsequential fact that the .co.uk address was unregistered, and the question is pretty much answered.
What is simple should be treated simply, what is difficult should be reduced to the simplest terms.
Josef Müller-Brockmann
There are other paragraphics out there on the web, including paragraphic.com, the pluralized paragraphics.com, the more exotic (well, German) paragraphic.de, and of course the Q10 Paragraphic Equalizer. I have nothing to do with any of them, and they have nothing to do with me.
Haven’t I seen some of this stuff before?
Although highly unlikely, this is technically possible. Some of the stuff on this site previously appeared on my original website: the eponymously titled bjgilbert.com. And it’s still there, albeit in hiberation; its many incarnations are carefully preserved in its vaults – a Darwinian expression of my online development.
The site was my old-school HTML stomping ground, somewhere I could hone my then-prototypical web design skills. The few good bits (like some of the photography and diversions) have now been spruced up and find a permanent home here.
What’s all this XHTML and CSS malarky?
XHTML is (pay attention!) a ‘reformulation of HTML in XML’, and CSS its glamourous assistant. Nowadays you can’t have one without the other, and the good folks at the W3 Consortium are the guardians and nuturers of these technologies.
The trouble with HTML was that it was (often) messy, an unholy mix of badly structured information and cludged presentational stuff, all put together using a markup language originally conceived in the 1970s. Subsequent revisions added a lot of extra markup created to allow designers to make webpages look nice (or, rather more frequently, nothing of the sort). The likes of Microsoft and Netscape didn’t help matters by building competing browsers and suggesting proprietary HTML markup that made pages designed for one browser incompatible with the other (or lots of others).
The XHTML/CSS axis is the backbone of modern attempts to create and encourage cross-browser web standards. The XHTML specification is simpler than the HTML one (it streamlines the markup language) although much more rigourous, and offers the inquiring web designer a way to entirely separate content from design. This more orderly approach makes it much easier to update or repurpose the content (since once you’ve got your information captured as XML anything, in theory, is possible); and also allows web designers (like me) to completely change what pages look like by altering just one (or maybe a few) files.
And what, precisely, is up with all these quotations meaningfully scattered around the site?
You mean like this one:
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Yes.
Don’t get too hung up about those. They’re just a few homilies and bon mots that have caught my eye or ear over time, and seem worth repeating.
Is that all for now?... Oh, you’ve gone.