Bewildering Stories News

Small signs of a big change

This issue marks a major turning point in the history of Bewildering Stories or at least the beginning of one. You’ve seen it — or will see it — in the stories: a menu bar across the top and wider margins than in the past.

What? That’s a major change? Surely you jest.

Just a few things on the page, so minor you’d hardly notice them, but they’re no joke: long hours of trial-and-error experimentation went into preparing them, and at last they work.

The horizontal menu bar is the most visible sign of our reorganization. The color-change buttons now have a tasteful border that makes the horizontal rule unnecessary. And the bottom of the page has plenty of navigation aids.

Still, long hours for that... How come?

Well, the style sheet, menu, color buttons and footer are all done with server-side includes now. That took a lot of mixing and matching between styles and table formats, among other things...

Good work, then, I suppose. But what do these server-thingies do for me?

They standardize our text presentation. And when we discontinue the frames in our website, they’ll allow us to update the back issues, as well. That will take time, of course.

Well, that seems worthwhile. But why are you discontinuing the frames? I rather liked having the menu in the left-hand margin.

We liked it, too. The menu made the text a reader-friendly width. And it was always there wherever you went. But it had one huge drawback: it made Bewildering Stories invisible.

Invisible? What? I could see you!

Because you came in through the home page. If a visitor came into the website by a link to anything other than the home page, the menu frame wasn’t there. The only way to reach the home page would be by clicking on the “Home” button at the bottom, if there was one. Or the visitor could edit the URL in the browser address line, but not everybody knows how to do that.

I think I see your point. But why not keep the frames? What harm did they do? If anyone looked up my name on the Net and found my story here, they could just zoom right in and then it wouldn’t be very hard to find the home page, right?

Not so fast there. As long as we have frames, we can’t expect that anyone will find your story here. Net indexers such as Google, Yahoo and All the Web send out robots to scour the Internet for websites to index. When they come across one with frames — such as ours — they pass it up like a dirty shirt...

What?! That’s terrible! Why would they stiff us like that?

Because the robots can’t get into the website. As far as they can see, everything has the same URL, namely that of the home page. And it is terrible indeed: frames make your story impossible to locate with a Net finder.

Just out of curiosity: don’t other websites use frames?

In fact, Bewildering Stories may be the last public website on the Net to use frames; there may be others, but I haven’t seen any. On the other hand, non-public websites, such as on-line university courses, use frames abundantly, for two reasons:

Course websites are often very complex, and they may have several menus of different kinds, all visible at once.
Course websites are closed to the public, and their administrators are delighted that frames deny access to Net indexers. Which is exactly the opposite of our priorities here at Bewildering Stories.

Why did you start with them, then? And why did you stick with them for so long?

When Spud created the initial design, he may have imitated another website’s format and added what he’d learned about frames in HTML. Neither he, Jerry nor I realized what the implications were.

Later, when we asked the opinion of professional designers, we were told in no uncertain terms that we’d taken the wrong road. By then we were in an awful bind: if we had simply yanked the frames forthwith, the entire website would have become unnavigable.

We began by installing the “Home” button at the bottom of pages. Most of the past year’s issues will have either good navigation or some. The back issues will be a problem, but we’re checking out ways of fixing them. The author bibliographies are a valuable tool, but we need to reformat the files themselves.

Let’s go for it, then. I can name a few things I’d like changed to the new format. Can you do that?

Yes, special requests will be honored. But not general ones, like “everything by so-and-so.” Just tell us the issue number and title, and we’ll be glad to reformat it.

You have a special motivation, don’t you? Namely the translation of Cyrano’s Voyage to the Moon in the Special Features.

Guiltee! But there is no special interest here. What we’re doing helps everyone.

What about the esthetics?

That’s a bigger problem than you might imagine. Both Jerry and I rather liked the menu in the left-hand frame. I tried to replicate it in a table, but it’s not the same thing at all. In a frame, the menu is separate from the text, because it stays put. In a table, the menu scrolls with the text and becomes part of it. And that gives the reader a bad visual suggestion: “Wouldn’t you rather go somewhere else?” That's the opposite of what we intend.

Put it at the bottom of the left-hand column? People could use it after finishing the story.

That sounds practical, but it looks awful. Your story would have a big, blue, featureless column on the left. It would distract the reader, because it would serve no obvious purpose. I even tried it: the menu looked like a pile of laundry at the bottom of a laundry chute.

What about floats and in-line frames?

Floats are used to make insets; the main text flows around them. I can’t think of anything more unsuitable for our menu. In-line frames seem to be used mainly for high-end forms, such as those used to make travel reservations on line. Most examples show them as floats with scrollbars. In-line frames are also incompatible with some browsers.

So what’s your solution?

Widen the margins. You know a solution is effective when it doesn’t create even worse problems than the ones you had!

When will you go “frameless”?

It’s all up to our publisher, Jerry Wright. When he throws the switch and we shed our frames, Bewildering Stories will at long last light up on the Net!

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