I set out to write well and present artfully a first page for six years of work. I find this nearly impossible given the mechanisms maintained by standards bodies on my behalf when rendering into an uncertain environment.
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We reserve a space among the assets for a custom welcome page which will exist outside the normal look and feel of federated wiki.
home
We wrote native html and css files and googled for the markup required for whatever we wanted. We wrote this on a laptop in a directory named 'home' which we uploaded whenever we made a change.
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The modern html/css environment has diverged so far from the WYSIWYG vision of graphical user interfaces as to maintain for full-time professionals only the ability to shape what appears before the reader.
WYSIWYG: What You See is What You Get.
I was suspicious of the phrase from the very beginning since it assumed the mostly static dimensions of a printed page. Still, I thought with accumulation of collective efforts progress would be made. But the limitations of purse and pocket have destroyed any hope for more than professionally pre-designed containers to be filled with words, slang, and the occasional emoji.
The arrows of my diagram disappear when printed on the commercial printer my office maintains for my use.
So today, after months of asking, I set up the mechanism to put a custom front page on a federated wiki site. This took some ingenuity in the shared-first world of the federation but a solution was at hand. To test it I composed a front page allowing myself only an hour as I wanted to get on with deploying it in a real production situation.
I prefer working with shades of gray, one strong color, and then well motivated splashes of black or color to demand attention. I've studied the mechanisms I wanted to use. Background images, proportional spaces, variable opacity, and responsive flowing elements. I didn't come close.
Ironically, todays bastion of WYSIWYG, presentation software, conference projectors, and commercial color printers all routinely dissapoint. Folks write bullet points because they reliably get through. Yuck.
I remain hopeful that the federation will fill endless linear and readable 480 pixel wide pages with words and mechanisms worthy of study and leave filling the width of the viewing space to the viewer. May they forgive me for the garbage heap of welcome pages I have allowed.