Policy statement for Communications Laboratory on WWW pages

This statement should not be taken too literally, as the author is really responsible for his/her own pages. This could be interpreted as advice

• WWW and Internet are nowadays seen as synonyms. This underestimates the other services like email, telnet, ftp, and news. The main advantages of web are its easiness of providing connections further with links and its graphical capabilities. People have been very excited about its capabilities, which can been enhanced with other types of multimedia like sound and some video. This goes often too far.
• The problem of fancy pages is twofold: First their creation requires great resources, often professional artists. Their cost would be too high for most parties with small or limited resources. in fact the fancy graphical information may be difficult to understand and interpret. Really only text could describe the matter unequivocally.
• Loading fancy pages also requires lots of resources, like lots of bandwidth or a loooong loading time. E.g. for myself who uses modem I hate too fancy graphics. Storing graphics also requires resources in servers. Although mass memory is cheaper and cheaper, using more and more graphics increases costs everywhere. Remember! Internet is not free: In our cases it is now taxpayer's money, in future the laboratory and later even the staff member must contribute in cash.
• The acronym "html" means hypertext mark-up language, which points out the crucial aspect of web pages, the hypertext capability. Note that it is hyperTEXT, not hypergraphics. It is true that links can be built also in graphics like we see everywhere. But using normal hypertext links is very easy and really is the easiest and clearest way to provide useful information. I propose that we use graphics only when it is really necessary like in showing our research results.
• Some home pages are filled with graphics so that loading it takes minutes even through Ethernet. This is really wrong. We should use only thumbnail type of graphics and at most one larger image per html file. Also a good practice would be to mention the size of the image file so that the user may decide if it is really worth loading. It may be interesting to load it once, but it is maddening if one has to load lots of graphics every time just to get a homepage with useful links. One way to get around this is to set the browser in text mode only.
• So my final word is that please be considerate towards your fellow surfers in the Internet. Please try to save resources and taxpayer's money.

"BOSS" of the Communications Laboratory