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- <h1>Welcome to the new Lurker's Guide!</h1>
-
- If you've visited before, you probably noticed that things look a wee bit
- different now. The Guide has undergone a near-total overhaul; no page was
- left untouched (unless we've missed something!)
-
- <p>
- Why the change? A few reasons. First, as the Guide continued to grow, it
- started to burst at the seams in places, and the need for a more
- structured organization (for instance, of the Other Resources section) became
- increasingly apparent. Though you may have looked at the home page
- and thought, "Aha, they've added a bunch of pictures to slow things down,"
- there's actually a considerable amount of change to the structure of the Guide.
-
- <p>
- If you've spent much time in the Guide in the past, you know it's big. Big
- enough, in fact, that it was often difficult to track down information you
- were looking for. The new look and feel should make navigating around the
- Guide a lot more straightforward. You always have a clear view of where you
- are in the Guide, with a consistent set of navigation tools. It's simple
- to hop from place to place, even to completely different sections.
-
- <p>
- And, of course, I'd be lying if I said appearance had nothing to do with the
- change. We think we've come up with a fairly pleasing look for the Guide,
- functional and appealing without being garish or hogging obnoxious amounts
- of bandwidth. A bit more on that below.
-
- <p>
- Who's "we?" Primarily, me (Steven Grimm) and
- <a href="http://www.zocalo.net/~danwood/">Dan Wood,</a>
- who contributed
- enormous amounts of time and energy iterating through literally hundreds of
- different design elements, seeing what worked and what didn't.
- <a href="/~funkster/">Larry Hastings</a>
- also provided some valuable usability feedback early on in the game.
-
- <p>
- <a href="http://diglib.stanford.edu/~mogens/">Christian Mogensen</a>
- put together one of the major features (and perhaps the most useful one) of the
- new Guide: the "Find" function. If you select the "Find" icon in the title
- bar at the top of every page, or follow the "Find" link on the home page,
- you'll be able to search every JMS message from Usenet and GEnie, as well
- as all the episode synopses and guide pages -- a wonderful tool for folks
- who're trying to figure out where the story's going before it gets there.
-
- <p>
- There are still some rough edges, places we haven't fixed up as well as we'd
- like; if you spot any truly embarrassing ones, please
- <a href="mailto:koreth+lgfeedback@midwinter.com">send me mail.</a>
- The new Guide will continue to evolve over time, just like any other Web
- site. If you have comments on the new graphics, you can also
- <a href="mailto:danwood@karelia.com">send mail to Dan.</a>
-
- <p>
- We hope you'll find the new Guide a worthwhile, interesting, and fun place to
- visit.
-
- <h3>Some technical notes</h3>
-
- <p>
- As a general rule, I've tried to stick to widely-implemented parts of the
- HTML 3.0 draft standard. The one exception you'll see nearly everywhere
- is that I use the Netscape extension to remove the borders from linked
- inline images. As soon as HTML 3 stylesheets are common,
- I will of course switch to them to control that aspect of the
- presentation. I have no desire to make the Guide browser-dependent.
- At the same time, using that extension improves the appearance of pages with
- lots of buttons so much that I thought it was worthwhile. (For various
- reasons, imagemaps aren't suitable replacements for the rows of buttons. Trust
- me, I considered them.) I've done my best to include meaningful ALT attributes
- everywhere so text-only people can take advantage of the new interface as well.
-
- <p>
- Those of you who're on low-speed or high-latency net links may object to the
- use of inline images rather than text. We've done our best to keep the
- navigational images as small as possible, and to reuse images wherever we
- can so you'll be able to take advantage of caching. You may find your visit
- speedier if you visit the
- <a href="nav/">Cache Loader</a>
- page before exploring (you'll also find a link to it toward the bottom of the
- home page.) In the
- near future, I'll also begin soliciting mirror sites around the world, so
- there'll be a fairly close copy of the Guide no matter where you are.
-
- <p>
- If you find the current setup unbearably slow, please let me know.
- Investigating a text-only or minimal-graphics mode is on my to-do list,
- and if there's enough demand I can do it before some other things. Be sure
- to tell me where you are and what your connection to the net is like; it
- may turn out that your needs will be met by a well-placed mirror site.
- (I can't guarantee you an answer, since I expect I'll be getting a lot of
- mail about this change, but your letter won't go unread.)
-
- <p align=right>
- Steven Grimm<br>
- October 16, 1995
-
- <p>
- <a href="whatsnew.html">To the What's New page</a>
-
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