Aryan Ameri wrote:
<how to please a CompSci professor who thinks non-standard techniques (Flash,etc) are great, by building a personal web site full of eye candy without using non-free software?>So, he really cares about a website's design, and insists that a site should be as graphic intensive as possible, and should have as much video audio, and animation in it as possible.In a nutshell, I want to design a website, that is pleasent to eyes, the webpage should be dynamic, and at the same time, I don't want to use non-free software in developing my site, and I don't want it to be non-standard.Is there such a souloution? I know some basic html, but I haven't really designed a website yet. Where shall I begin? What shall I use? Is it possible to design a *nice* and a *standard* webpage? I don't want to start coding html in Emacs. I have heard that there are some free tools available, for the purpose of building websites. But I don't have a clue about any of them.
Amaya, Mozilla Composer, straight plain text editing of HTML code.You probably already have Mozilla Composer; it can get you started, but I wouldn't rely on it for "real" use.
In order to get the eye candy he desires, you'll probably have to resort to some non-free stuff, like Java and Flash. Still, as you implied, you can create two parallel sites; one that's clean, and one that's fluffy.
Some folks doing this sort of project might look into some of the techniques that can take advantage of the flaws in Windows, and offer a simple Java game to entertain him which requires an AciveX download or something, and then after the game is played, instead of displaying high scores, display some confidential info they've reaped from his drive. (Of course, this could get them in trouble, with him, with the school, maybe with the law, so I'm certainly not recommending that you do this.) Then they might make the point that it's this sort of non-standard hijacking of web standards that allows this sort of thing. They might also put something in his registry if possible that would remind him of this every time he boots up.
You might be able to do some creative stuff with CSS, which would really be a coup, since then your site could be standards-compliant, but not being a web developer myself, I can't really address this. It's just a vague idea.
Kent