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\title{Why Must University Profs Have Ugly Websites?}
\author{Andre Masella}
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If it were simply a question of laziness, I would completely understand
why a professor's website is ugly. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
Near as I can tell, professors go out of their way to make ugly websites.
This phenomenon is not confined to the University of Waterloo, but to
almost every university website I've found. Now, there are exceptions, but
they seem few and far between. \par

If you made a website without any formatting commands, it would be rather
plain. Black `Times New Roman' text on a white background with blue and
purple links---that would at least be how a default Internet Explorer
configuration would display it. It would be quite plain, but it would also
be quite legible. If the \texttt{<H1>} tag was used for the section
headers, it would be just fine to read and print. This, however, it not
what most profs do, they usually begin by applying a background colour. If
the text remains black, the background must be dark too, to obscure the
text. Common colours include dark oranges, navy blue and various shades of
brown. Sometimes, the prof will choose a black background and pick a
better text colour, like green (specifically the shade of green that one
finds on a decrepit Wyse terminal) or a terrible amber (in case Wyse
terminals are too new). If they do manage to get this far, they will
inevitably forget to change the link colours, making it difficult to read
the hyperlinks. Occasionally, a prof will use a background image, usually
one of the pseudo-paper images from Netscape Composer, that is actually
pleasant by relative standards. \par

The style of HTML is often what would have been the popular style for
Netscape Navigator circa-1995. I would have assumed that using modern W3C
compliant code with \textit{cascading style sheets} would have improved
the visual appearance of the page, but alas, I am quite wrong. I have seen
more and more pages following the XHTML and CSS2 specifications that manage
to reproduce the '95 Internet feel. Actually, in some cases, it has made
things worse (the best example being a page I saw with multiple style
sheets that had floating text over images that couldn't bet read and links
that would expand to give descriptions which would shift the page layout
so they were no longer under the mouse cursor causing the page to
``oscillate''. \par

To complete the look, it is best to provide in consistent navigation, dead
ends and broken links. If a prof is well established, then it is
traditional to have several different versions of a website on different
servers at the same university, all without any kind of date stamps. I
wouldn't complain if prof had sites that were ugly and hard to navigate
out of laziness, but there seems to be an active effort in producing sites
like this. Of course, this does not include all professor's web sites.
Perhaps the entire profession is sitting in a certain equilibrium; that
is, if they cared less or more, they could produce more \ae{}sthetically
pleasing web pages. \par

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