about the site

This site exists to be a personal website for Michael W. Harris. That's me. As I prefer writing about myself in the first person, rather than the third person, I shall do that from now on.

Designed

I take pride in the design of the site. While I realise that it is not to everyone's taste, it follows the principles of web design that I espouse. It loads quickly, is usable without JS and CSS, the navigation works as I like, etc. It should be accessible, despite the choice of user-agent or browser of any visitor.

Free

As outlined on my license page, everything on this site originally by me has a free license. That includes both the content, writing, photos and etc., and the code. If you aren't sure what the license is for something in particular, and you want to use it, please contact me.

Standard

Each page on this site should match W³C and other standards. The HTML or XHTML should be fully valid, the CSS should also be valid, and I aim to have each page accessible and usable by all users (a known exception is the photo sub-site). If you have any comments, or if you notice that any page needs improving, please tell me.

Philosophy

My philosophy of web design boils down to accessibility. That means clean HTML, no dependence on JS, CSS or images, and a quick download as much as possible. I also try and make things maintainable for myself, after all, that's just sensible. Oh, and the best SEO is an accessible, usable and useful website with good content.

Personal

This website is the personal website of Michael W. Harris. It exists for no other person. You may call it a vanity site if you wish.

I originally created it to have a place to put some writing, photos and programming online. It still does those things. It now also has a section on some of the services (freelance work) I can do.

The thing is, the main audience for the website is myself, rather than anyone else. I make it to make me happy. :) That's why I don't care about MSIE. That said, if you have any comments about how you think the site could be made better, contact me, don't be a stranger ya hear?

I found an interesting quote. Home pages are the pet rock of the 90s. We all have them, we all think they're very cute. But in a few years we're going to look back and be pretty embarrassed. Two pages attribute this to Tony Shepps, while one attributes a similar quote to Kim Alm. Which reminds me I want to sell pet rocks...

Browser Support

This site does not support any particular browser, except for MSIE. Sorry, I got that wrong. I don't support MSIE, except to degrade the user experience in certain cases. That is, MSIE is the only browser I pay any particular attention to, making sure it gets a worse experience than the others. The others, I ignore to a greater or lesser extent. I create for the standards. Of course, if you pay me (or I'm otherwise creating a site for you), I don't do deliberately degrade the MSIE experience, just here on my personal site, where I don't really care what you think. (Also, you can turn off style sheets in the majority of cases, and miss most of the degradation.) Any MSIE specific text you see is put in by the use of conditional comments, more info at the MSDN site (read the comments as well) and Quirksmode.

How does degrading the MSIE experience help accessibility? Well, I guess I could argue something along the lines of that it is possible to still see the site info even with MSIE (it's not like I force a crash or anything like I've seen some sites promise - crash MSIE). Also, you can turn off CSS, which is what causes the degraded experience. Or you could just call me a hypocrite. That's fine too.

Easter Eggs

There are some minor easter eggs hidden. They exist mainly on the main index page or thereabouts. In some places you can hover over a word or phrase and get some extra text. Sorry people with touch screens only, or using Lynx, you miss out on the fascinating little bits I have included.