You would be forgiven for not realising the enormous changes that have gone on behind the scenes here at “Folk on Line” over the past year or so.
Little did I know, when I raised £25m in venture capital to develop the income streams available on my web archive and in the magazine, that I had such a roller coaster year ahead of me. At its peak, “Folk on Line” was valued at £500m on paper, I was employing 75 staff who seemed to have nothing to do all day but play table football, and I could have even bought the entire Topic “Voice of the People” CD series.
Except to do that I would have had to cash in my shares, which it turned out were worth approximately 75p. And I don’t mean each.
So the revolutionary javascript advertising banners on the page you are reading have been disabled, I’ve had to dispose of my call centre in Seattle, Washington, Tyne and Wear, and my employees have been laid off. They even took the table football table with them.
But worry not. Dotcoms may going under like nobody’s business, but there are webmasters left built of stronger stuff, ready to stand by the original principles on which the World Wide Web was founded.
And if you have ever seen him perform, you won’t be surprised to learn that Dick Gaughan is one of them. I’ve mentioned Dick’s online activities in these pages several times before, in issues 70, 71, 73 and 74 to be exact, but I was astonished to discover while preparing this column that in the five years(!) I’ve been writing “Folk on Line” I have not yet recommended his website. Time to make amends.
Prominent on his home page are quotes from Dick’s hero Woody Guthrie, a link to his archive of David Harley’s tipsheet for floorsingers (FoL issue 76), and the message: “I am a passionate believer that all websites should be accessible to all people.” There are tour dates and a discography – the man has to make a living – but more symptomatic of Dick’s philosophy are his “rant” about website accessibility, as well as the availability of the words and music to many of his songs.
When Dick guested at the Ram Club recently, performing two superb sets, I took the opportunity to ask him if I could email him a few questions. He responded with typical generosity, so I asked him how he began. “I started using the Internet while the WWW was still a bit of a novelty. Most of my net use in those days was newsgroups, email and FTP. It was a good time – you had to learn at least a wee bit about how it all worked as the kind of do-everything, no-knowledge-required software wasn’t available. I’m not entirely in favour of the contemporary vogue for ‘have all the benefits of everything without having to learn anything’. I think if the human race continues down that road, we’ll end up with milk bottles which have ‘open other end’ printed on their bottoms. Technology can take us forward but badly used it can take us backwards.”
Dick started out using the fairly lo-tech hardware and software available in the mid-Nineties. When I asked if he had any training, he replied: “I was pretty much self-taught. I learned to program in the early 1980s, so finding my way around HTML wasn’t really difficult. While HTML is not a programming language, it does help in structuring documents if you have some knowledge of programming. I wrote all my code in Notepad. It was all text with just a few simple graphics.”
In the past few years, as the e-commerce hopefuls attempted to hijack the Web, there was a sudden change in the appearance of web pages. As Dick says in his “rant”: “Some smart person decided that the WWW could be used, not to exchange information, but to make money through reducing it to yet another marketing tool. As they were not exchanging information, presentation became paramount. Another victory of style over content.”
While allowing himself to improve his site and adopt best practices such as giving graphics an “alt” name, which can be read out by computers used by blind or partially sighted people, he has stayed committed to the concept of accessibility. “I write all my own code from scratch. All the software packages I’ve seen which aspire to ‘writing HTML’ for the user produce code which is badly written, verbose and full of bugs. Anyone who wants to build a site which can be easily maintained and will work across all platforms really has no alternative to getting their hands dirty and learning HTML. It’s not difficult but it does require a little bit of work.”
While this will mean little to the two-thirds of the British households who have so far avoided going online, for those of us who have set up their own website, this is mightily impressive. But how does he make sure it works? “I do all my graphics with Paint Shop Pro and do my basic work checking with Opera then, once I’ve got it working, I check it using Netscape and MSIE. I’ve also kept a version 2 of Netscape – if it works on that, it’ll work on anything! But the most useful thing in building sites is user feedback, especially from people with disabilities. If anyone finds something which doesn’t work on their particular setup, I want to know about it. Like everyone, I make mistakes and I can’t correct them unless I know about them.”
Asked whether he feared the e-commerce boys would destroy the Web, he said: “The Web is what we make it. The more the Web develops the more I see the wisdom of the approach Berners-Lee has taken. Some people will fill their sites with all sorts of non-standard technologies and stuff and people like me will shout loudly that they’re being anti-social pillocks. But the useful data, the stuff which will really make a difference, will simply work round all the deluge of marketing, advertising, porn and all the other junk and provide the long-term future of the web.”
Englishman Tim Berners-Lee was the man who began planning the design of the World Wide Web in 1990 while he was working at CERN, the particle-physics research centre in Switzerland, to help people work together. And he organised the World Wide Web Consortium with the aim of preventing its commercial takeover. His friend Michael Dertouzos, in the foreword to Berners-Lee’s book “Weaving the Web” says: “As technologists and entrepreneurs were launching or merging companies to exploit the Web, they seemed fixated on one question: ‘How can I make the Web mine?’ Meanwhile, Tim was asking, ‘How can I make the Web yours?’”
So while urging you to check out Dick’s site, I’ll leave the last word to him: “I’ll continue to try to make my sites universally accessible and if that means I’m always one step behind the cutting edge, that’s fine by me. Provided enough of us stick to using the web to provide information resources which are universally accessible, the web as we know it will survive, whatever the empire builders do.”
Empire builders? Does he mean me?