A moment ago, I was looking at a webpage and I could only laugh a bit at myself and the world around me, at least the cyber part of it. Back in the 1990s fresh out of high school I had a going concern for more than a year creating, designing and coding websites for various small businesses around the area, like my dad’s data processing company with his partner, and like this one-man consulting firm, and like the local radio station, and like my own business making websites. I was a full-fledged web designer.

​

Then the tsunami of technology crested and crashed and long since left me buried in the sand. Websites nowadays are applications, not mere brochures, and even in the basic display of information there has to be some pizzazz. For example, check out the clever web-coding on the webpage mytotalretail.com/longform/retailer-of-the-year-barry-beck-bluemercury/. They’ve made it so you can scroll the text up without skipping past, but in fact drawing attention to, the stationary full-screen dominant photo of the featured couple. Is that CSS? How are they doing that? The source code is Greek, figuratively.

​

This is not the HTML 1.0 I played around with late at night back in the innocence of the late 1990s. And creating something like this - digitaleditions.napco.com/publication/?i=442622&ver=html5#{"issue_id":442622,"page":0} - was and is and I’m fairly certain always will be far beyond my “Hello World” programming capabilities. I just hope it’s enough that I know that I don’t know anything about these things.

​

See also Barry Beck for more interesting information.