Dr Bandwidth's Guide to
The Seven Deadly Sins of the Internet
An Introduction skip the intro
Dr B and his Guide came into being in 1997 while I was a student in
the Electronic Design & Interactive Media course at RMIT University in
Melbourne, Australia.
Having done my graphic design training in the pre-computer era,
I'd learned to set type by hand, paste up artwork with rubber
cement and letter with a #00 sable brush. The finished design then
went through a long process before the original idea appeared in
its final form.
Like many of my contemporaries, I put off dealing with computers
for as long as I could, but the opportunity to "upskill" eventually
presented itself and I went back to school.
One idle afternoon I found a stray folder on the school network
that contained some HTML files. I started tinkering with them,
viewing the results in Netscape (version 1.1, as I recall). Suddenly things started happening! I changed the text in the
file and it changed in the browser! I changed the color tags and
the color changed in the web page!
Wonderful! Instantaneous! Being so used to that long production
chain between original concept and finished product, HTML was a
revelation. Instant publishing!
Another revelation was the Internet. Student access provided me
with command-line surfing (via Lynx) and I clocked up hundreds of
after-midnight hours. Then came a commercial ISP and graphical
browsing and thus did I first encounter the Seven Deadly Sins. Dr
Bandwidth first appeared in one of my course assignments.
Leaving college, my graphic design
business became entirely digital. My 'studio' was online, my product
virtual and the delivery electronic - a far cry from those days of
hand-etched line blocks, presses and printing inks and those long,
long waits.
A few months ago I discovered Doctor Bandwidth still valiantly
preaching his sermon from some long-forgotten RMIT server. Long may he
continue to do so, but with education budgets in Australis
shrinking so fast they might soon have to sell off the server, I've
posted him here as well - a little security for him in his declining
years.
I've resisted the urge to tinker with the design and, apart from
a tidy-up and an extra link, the pages look pretty much as they did
in 1997.
Not much has changed on the Internet, either. You'd think these
'Sins' would have long since been expunged, but they're still being
committed. And there's a whole new batch of 'Sins' as well, with
pop-ups and pop-unders and more java distractions and flashy splash
screens and streaming this and streaming that...
Maybe it's time the good Doctor came out of retirement and
enumerated Seven More Deadly Sins of the Internet?
Anyway, I hope you enjoy
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