Watts Online

November 3 1998

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A spot of boredom

SOMETIMES surfing the Web for a living can be as boring as any other job . . . with the hopeful exception of brain surgeon. The Web is a vast resource capturing the outpourings of 100 million or so souls crying out for attention. Some days they just want to post pictures of their pets, however.

Earlier in the week, trying not to be diverted to endless games of solitaire, I followed the recommendation of the Guardian newspaper's Hot Links guide and had a look at what was claimed to be the latest, funny, you-beaut site; the Dialectizer. If you type a URL (Web address) into a window at this site, it will translate the page into one of seven dialects: Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, or Pig Latin. I asked it to convert editor Paul Murray's home page into Swedish Chef (the unintelligible character from the Muppets).

The following lines: "One of the best things about working at The West is Dean Alston. Dean is a mad genius artist who has won most of Australia's top cartooning prizes" were rendered thus: "Oone-a ooff zee best theengs ebuoot vurkeeng et Zee Vest is Deun Elstun. Bork bork bork! Deun is a med geneeoos erteest vhu hes vun must ooff Oostreleea's tup certuuneeng preezes."

Similar childish translations resulted in Cockney and Redneck. The Dialectizer seems to be aimed at insomniacs, drug users, drunks and undergraduates.

Dissatisfied and still bored, I searched for a diversion promised by Ziff Davis Publishing which had a story about a graphics company which, as a way of promoting its product, had decided to name the Web's ugliest page. The dubious honour went to ICQ's home page at mirabilis.com.

It is ugly; full of text, harsh colours and so forth. But as it also housed one of the best communication tools on the Net, I wondered what the fuss was about. The Web is not there to be pretty. It exists to educate, entertain and inform.

More dissatisfied and barking-mad bored, I resolved to set myself a challenge . . . to learn JavaScript. This programming language lets a Web page author add all sorts of tricks to HTML to enhance their output. You can have text or graphics pop up when you roll the mouse over part of the page, drop-down URL menus, time and date displays, morphing pages and much more.

Unfortunately JavaScript is often browser-dependent. What works in Internet Explorer 4 may fail miserably in Netscape 3, or vice-versa. But it has to be better than the cheap laughs at the Dialectizer and the fun-poking at Web sites that do not use the latest graphic imaging techniques.

So I have resolved to learn it. The Help Desk has a selection of URLs where you often need only cut and paste examples to alter your output radically. I have also put a trial page on the Web where I will try different JavaScript experiments over the next few weeks; just to show that anybody can do it.

Then you can be bored while I occupy myself.

Help Desk:

My experiments
Gamelan
Cut-N-Paste JavaScript
Danny Goodman's JavaScript Pages
JavaScript
Spotlight on JavaScript

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