Web page design

• Abigail's WWW Dream -- how it could be, but not (yet?) how it is -- although Bertrand Meyer thinks it is changing .
• Jakob Nielsen's Website on good web design, with excellent columns like Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design and the problems of linkrot
• Lynx Viewer to see your site as others may see it.
• review: Web Pages that Suck
• All purpose disclaimer

• Russ Allbery's eloquent rant about how Internet newsgroups are being ruined by lazy spammers, misusing them for tasks better suited to the Web anyway.

• Composing Good HTML
• Web Design Group's Web Authoring FAQ
• The HTML Coded Character Set
• When you've just been told, yet again, to upgrade your browser, the HTML Terrorist's Handbook provides a little light relief. I particularly like the page that presents appropriately on frameless browsers but not on those that support frames!

I'm perfectly happy to use "old" versions. Most of this stuff is available in much more recent versions, often with the orignal company having been taken over! But, "if it ain't broke, don't fix [or upgarde] it"...

• SoftQuad's HoTMetaL PRO 4.0, to write HTML. I used to use just a text editor, but it was getting a bit too complex to maintain and check everything.
• Hewlett Packard 's ScanJet G2710, for scanning text and images.
• Corel's Paint Shop Pro X4, to touch up scanned images
• Python 2.7 , for generating my book review pages.
• Caere's OmniPage Pro 10, for recognising scanned text.
• MathType 5.0, to format mathematics, saving the result as transparent gif s. (Or I occassionally use LaTeX , view on screen, grab the image into Paint Shop Pro, and save as a gif . One day I'll get around to MathML ).
• Xenu's Link Sleuth , for finding broken links.

Using OCR leads to some fun misreadings, like Steinbeck's lesser-known soft-furnishing classic The Drapes of Wrath , and that obscure branch of the mathematics of fruit the distribution of prune numbers .