tonight I was looking for a Word document that I wrote at least 5 or 6 years ago…which means at least 5 or 6 computers ago. something for the game (we’re ditching Greyhawk in favor of the world that I made up for our last long-term game).
I didn’t find it, but I did find a Web version, in a backup of the site I had when my webhost two hosts ago went suddenly and freakishly bankrupt.
I probably made that page in late 1998 or early 1999, when I was still fairly new to the whole web design thing, and when I saw the file I was dreading what would need to be done to it. to my surprise, it wasn’t that bad to convert to “modern” markup. (warning: gaming fluff!)
* it already had a stylesheet, which just set background and link colors.
* the table of contents was a single paragraph with breaks: easy to convert to a list
* the headers weren’t in hn tags, but that was easy too, since they were the only uses of the font tag (for bigger text).
* in some places I’d used breaks and in others paragraphs. that was the trickiest thing. I found myself adding more headers for readability, to indicate sections.
then 10 minutes of adding styles, most of which was spent picking a couple of subtle colors. I used the most straightforward selectors, which means it doesn’t look quite right in IE, but I’m okay with that. if it were a more important job, I’d work on making sure that the ToC didn’t collide with the text at smaller window (or larger font) sizes, but whatever.