TECH INFO SOME MAY FIND USEFUL

This is a cartoon site, and that means graphics galore. Which brings up some technical questions....

YOU TAKE THE LO-RES
I'LL TAKE THE HI-RES

Some of the graphics are relatively small, but many are big fat files requiring good monitors to see. No matter how enjoyable a page might be, if it takes 30 minutes to download on your 14.4K modem, you won't appreciate it as much.

For those not on high-speed connections, all the menus list the approximate combined kilobytes of any given page so you can calculate your download time. For example:

Creative Use of White Space
Drawing a blank
2 files, ~21K

There is one web page file, about 5K, and one graphic file, about 16K. According to Doctor-HTML.com, this 16K graphic would take less than five seconds (4.44) to download on a 28.8 modem. Your milage will vary.

UB readers, as much as anyone, should appreciate that the problems of webworks development in this day and age are like the problems of bringing advanced truth to this world's varied mix of stages of biological or social evolution: it's all uneven and jumbled, with civilizations still stuck back in the barbarian days of CGA picture-tubes and telephone modems rubbing shoulders with other tribes who have already zoomed ahead to the advanced ages of high-speed modem life and true-color LCD-pixelated light. The same "message" won't be best for everybody.

So, I have provided a few low-res smaller-file-size alternatives to some cartoons, but there's a lot of big graphic files here. Folks with slower internet connections or lower-resolution displays may prefer the low-res versions of cartoons over the high-res, and may find some cartoons altogether too big to enjoy in one way or another. Some older systems may not even have the color resolution to properly display the graphics!

Just so's y' know: the comics were developed on a system set at 1024*768, true color. With the Opera (opera.com) browser at its excellent full-screen mode, the widest (A Walk with the Folks) and the tallest (The Big Three) single graphics will fit (the latter just barely) on the screen.

BROWSER COMPATIBILITY

Web pages have been tested on Windows using Internet Explorer and Opera and they look as intended (including the non-HTML-standard color horizontal rules) and work as intended (except for IE's problem with internal anchor tags on uncached pages). I personally prefer Opera (opera.com) for browsing, but it has some glitches sometimes portraying graphics on my system. I haven't tested the pages on Mozilla or Netscape or anything else.

Graphic display, resolution, and file size choices aside, I strive for as much universal browser compatibility as possible in creating the web pages. In the interest of simplicity, I have avoided using Java, Javascript, and (although they do look interesting for the future) style sheets.

Feedback on how everything seems on your system welcomed at ubcomix@mindfulwebworks.com

USE YOUR BROWSER'S CACHE

The animated UB Comix banner (at the very top of this page) is on every page. That's a big file (90 seconds download at 28.8), but you probably have already downloaded it, and need not do so again if your browser is set to retrieve recent images from the cache. Images on this menu are used as directional pointers on other pages, so if your browser uses the cache for images and you allow the menu to fully load all images, you will save some download time as you go through the comics.

PNGs PREFERRED OVER GIFs

All UB Comix graphics have been converted from the privately-owned GIF format to the public-domain PNG format, except for the two animated graphics, which are still in GIF format until MNG becomes more popularly supported. Not all browsers fully support even PNG graphics yet. (See notes on browser compatibility.) For example, Opera, which is the web browser I'd like to like most, didn't support PNG transparency at all until the latest version (6). [Addendum 2007 Apr 06: All major browsers now support PNG, although some don't support PNG fully (especially partial-transparency). Most still don't support MNG natively. And I've been told that GIF is no longer commercial, but PNGs are still better.]

ALTERNATIVE ACCESS

As much as anything in this unfair world, the WWWeb is about fair and universal accessibility! I'd enjoy translating the cartoons into text tales for those who cannot see them in their current form. I envision (no pun intended) entirely separate pages where the humor was actually transformed to text, not merely the cartoons described. Meanwhile, I've not even provided "alternate" text on any of the cartoons, so the sight slighted are unserved by UB Comix for now. I apologize and ask patience and understanding.

I think that's everything.

Did you actually read this far?