Re: Show A Little Devotion and *that* page

[Len Bullard <cbullard@HiWAAY.net>]

No fight.  Just talk.  Skip this if Kate On The Web
subjects don't interest you.

[Ron]

> I, for one, would be quite lost in all this  WEB stuff.   
> I've purposely ignored WEB technology until the dust settles.
> only then will I  sit down and learn the ropes....and eventually 
> create my own page....perhaps with frames, prehaps without...

Here's "the deal with dog".  Everyone gets lost. But for 
anyone who does want to make a Kate page, there are lots 
of us out here able to help you do that for any options 
you care to take.  We've been lost here before.  

I am in complete agreement with chris, vickie, steve and 
woj that if you do, it is best to make sure certain things 
get done so it plays for the widest possible audience.  As they 
correctly say, done right, frames-enabled browsers see
frames and non-framed browsers don't.  But the author 
has to see to this.

my philosophy on my page leans toward entertainment.
make it cool and fun and they will come.  For example, 
IED et al's The Garden is the Facts.  Keeping it simple 
and easy to get helps it with its mission.  I have a  
page that's fun oriented, but I point it toward
the information pages so folks who want to can 
skip my stuff and get to what they want. So, you will 
find in the left frame, the links to the garden
and any other page I am made aware of.  When Jon 
Terje Lillby informed me they crashed on some 
targets, I reset them to target=_top so that wouldn't
happen.  And so it goes. With a little help from my 
friends, it gets better and the hit rate is good.
I made the cool worlds list and into four books.
So, for getting the word on kate out, this is working.

I frame VRML worlds so people who want to play with them 
can do it without a lot of reconnects. There are
some technical details here I don't want to bore
you with.  I am not trying to help Netscape; I am 
trying to help kate.  end of story for me.

The problem of waiting till the dust settles to learn is that 
it never will.  What will and is happening is that the 
editors improve so it is pretty much a WYSIWYG 
affair to make and publish pages. Some really good 
editors for ancillary notations like VRML are coming out 
now but the language is changing quick.  So, it takes a
lot of effort and one has to decide if it's worth it.

When synthesizers started coming down from the quarter 
million dollar Moogies, they were tough beasties to 
master.  You had to understand oscillators, filters, 
freqNotch stuff, waveform types etc.  It was a bitch just to get them 
to make something that sounded better than the average 
Theremin and even more of a pain to get them to do it
twice the same way unless one took copious notes.
  
When the Moody Blues released their string machine,
it was outlawed by American music unions for putting 
musicians out of work.  That didn't slow the guys 
in muscle shoals down a bit.  But the sound sort of
sucked, and keeping those tapes working was 
not trivial.  So it found a place on a lot of live stages
in house gigs where we could keep it working.
Live music did a giant leap forward, and a market for
expensive keyboards like the early Yamaha and Roland 
keyboards was born.  The Arp Odyssey was a real love.

The musicians that bit the bullet,
bought Mini-Moogs and Korgs, etc. mastered the internal 
techniques that were later hidden by push button interfaces
and libraries of patches.  They also made all the money 
creating the patches.  If you remember the story of
Kate going to work with Peter Gabriel and seeing how 
he used the early drum machines, etc., he taught her,
she went home and worked with the boxes, and began to evolve 
a new sound for herself and a new technique of composition.
That's what "rolling the ball" is all about.

Lots of us are happy to roll it in your direction.

Cheers,

len