Showing off an e-mail

[Chris++]

Dear Chris,

Once a year or so, I run a computer search for my own name; I invariably find some fascinating stuff. This time, Chris, my favorite pieces were your insights and comments on the early days of gaming, your perspectives on various 2600 games, and your experiences at the CGEs. Your articles are amongst the most well thought-out and humorously balanced on the whole Internet. I sure hope you'll be at this year's show.

Best,

Bill Kunkel

 

Woo-hoo! (Of COURSE I'm going to ask him if he wouldn't mind subjecting himself to an interview!)

 

CF

[Chris++]

P.S. He was one of the three founders of Electronic Games magazine back in 1981. I guess I should've explained myself. It's nice to be "qualified" by a guy who's been writing about games for twenty years, that's all.

 

 

CF

[tiggerthehun]

The resident English teacher gives you an A+ on all fronts... Awesome articles!

[Chris++]

Thanks!

 

 

Bill agreed to the interview!! I'll have a link to it early next week...wait 'till you guys see what kinds of interesting insights (and stories) this guy has about our hobby!

 

Everyone have a good weekend!

CF

 

P.S. Tutored English...and that was only one kid at a time! I don't comprehend how you deal with a whole class! I have a lot of admiration for teachers. (Especially teachers who like my articles. )

[Big Player]

I'll look forward to reading the interview and see what Bill has been up to. I had a subscription to Electronic Games magazine for years. Oh I so sad to see it fold. And really sad when I threw all my old issues away. But they were in tatters anyway, having been read so much.

[Chris++]

Okay, the interview's up! Let me know what you think, folks..

 

http://www.geocities.com/flynnwins

 

CF

[+Cafeman]

Great Interview, more interesting than any recent interview I've read with the likes of SEGA's Yu Suzuki or Yuji Naka, that's for sure.

 

Advertise this interview, people need to read it. Although, I'm shocked ole Bill likes them Wrasslin games so much.

[NoahsMyBro]

Hi Chris. I just finished reading your interview with Bill Kunkel. It was a good read. Thanks for the time and effort you put forth - I enjoyed it.

 

One note though:

I'm not very skilled/knowledgeable regarding web design, but your webpage has a slight quirk. I'm browsing with Opera 5.12, and when I try to view your page, most of the text doesn't appear. Opera allows the user to toggle between 'document mode' and 'user mode'. These settings refer to how style -sheets are handled, I think. I'm not sure about this stuff, but basically I think it means I can choose to view the page as it was written, or, in the case of colors, fonts, backgrounds, etc... I cna choose to override the original code and view the page using my pre-defined style settings.

 

On your page, in order to see the majority of the text, I needed to override your design. Until I did that, the page looked almost completely blank to me - just black nothingness.

[Chris++]

Thanks for the kind words, fellas. Regarding Opera, that's the strangest thing! I haven't had any other complaints about the site. Maybe it's an Opera quirk or something. The only three appearance-specific things going on in the HTML are a background color change (to black), a text color change (to purple) and a font change (to AGaramond). There's nothing weird beyond that -- no Flash, no Java, etc. Perhaps Opera can't recognize the AGaramond font?

 

If anyone else has any problems, please let me know.

 

Regarding the advertisement of the interview, I'm not sure what to do beyond what I've already done (put the site on all the search engines, in other words). Alex or Albert -- what d'ya think? Could you mention the interview on the AA home page? Thanks!

 

CF

[Big Player]

Cool stuff.

 

Ah, I wonder what Bill thinks about the classic gaming enthusiasts and this site? Also, what does he think about how valuable of those old EG magazines? Of course I'm just armchair quarterbacking, so forgive me.

[slapdash]

The problem exists in Opera 6.0 too.

 

Generally speaking, that HTML isn't anywhere NEAR being valid... The "font" entity is not a block-level element, but you're using it that way. Opera doesn't forgive invalid HTML the way IE and NS do.

 

Secondly, you have <font face="AGaramond">, which is the only option the browser has outside of applying a different style (user in the case mentioned).

 

If you use a style tag at the end of the <head> part of your document to set this, you can fix both issues. Something like:

 

<style type="text/css">

BODY {

 color: #FYBFFF;

 background-color: #000000;

 font-family: AGaramond, Garamond, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

}

A:link {

 color: #FF9FFF

 background-color: #000000;

}

A:visited { 

 color: #FF9FFF

 background-color: #000000;

}

A:active {

 color: #FF9FFF

 background-color: #000000;

}

</style>

 

...should do the trick. The "background-color" thing is a bit redundant, but is valid as is. Note that you can suggest multiple fonts -- it will progress down the list until you find one that it can use.

[Chris++]

Okay, if I want my HTML "valid" -- Mr. Updates-His-2600-Connection-Site-Once-a-Year... ...and I implement your kindly offered assistance, what does the /css do? Does this require additional information to follow it, or is it a stand-alone instruction?

 

-- Thought-he-was-good-at-HTML-Chris

[slapdash]

Chris wrote:

Okay, if I want my HTML "valid" -- Mr. Updates-His-2600-Connection-Site-Once-a-Year...

 

Hey, I should point out that the web site is still Tim's. (Though in his defense, I haven't had the time to take it over :-)

 

...and I implement your kindly offered assistance, what does the /css do?

 

In older versions of HTML you could "style" information via style tags. Later on they came up with a scheme to remove style info from the HTML somewhat, and called it CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The "cascading" part comes from the inheritence of style properties, though of course implementation is occasionally flawed (all three of IE 5 & maybe 6, Netscape 6 and Opera 5 & 6 are finally getting closer and closer to fully and properly implementing HTML & CSS).

 

The idea is, HTML is for organization, CSS for presentation. You can make the CSS a separate document, but you can also make just a style section in the HTML itself, which is still better for the org/pres separation than inlining multiple style & font tags.

 

Does this require additional information to follow it, or is it a stand-alone instruction?

 

You should be able to just drop in what I posted into your HTML doc where I said, and it will work. There are probably other smaller things that are invalid, but you can check at http://validator.w3.org (and if you do separate CSS docs, you can validate them at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ too).

[Chris++]

Thanks -- I appreciate the help!

 

CF