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Sometime in 1994... this page kept around for historical curiosity.

Throughout my pages you'll see little graphical building blocks that (hopefully) clarify and humorize my presentation. Where possible, I attribute the sources:

The balls you see on this page originated with Andreas Ley at http://www.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de:80/, where he presents other graphical elements as well. I have two gripes with Andreas' offerings: (1) extraneous area around the image that makes the graphic twice as large and (2) non-essential bits haven't been made transparent. These shortcomings have been changed with the graphics you see on this page. To have a ball gif downloaded to your machine click and hold on its image until your browser presents a pop-up menu.

               

(Each ball is about 314 bytes.)

Interlaced GIFs

Interlacing GIFs is important because it allaws saavy browsers to display portions of your images as they're being downloaded, and refine them to a clear image if the person hangs around. It's the difference between getting immediate feedback to users of slow bandwidth connections (modems) or busy networks (all of us).

Transparent GIFs

Transparent GIFs allow the background color to shine through selected areas of a displayed image. If your browser is capable of honoring the transparency request then the small balls above will appear round and the buttons at the bottom of the page will appear to float above the page.

In an image one color may be tagged as the transparent color. The enlarged ball GIF shows that the corners are a dark green, not easily confused with the by the web-administering human with the many-shades-of-red ball.

Adobe Photoshop boo-boo

To get around the Adobe Photoshop's inability to correctly save as GIF87a, use either GraphicConverter, JPEGView, or GIF Converter to read in the GIF and write it out correctly.