Hello, you've reached Jacob Mandelson's home page.

I'm not in at the moment, but if you'd like to leave an email message,
the address should be obvious.

*BEEP*



I was going to update my web page, as I hadn't done so in years, but I 
had problems.  The Web had changed in those years since I authored my 
original pages, when there was no Netscape or MSIE or JavaScript or
banner ads, when CERN was the center of the WWW and Mosiac was new.

Images were scarce, not just because Mosiac was newly deployed, but
because bandwidth was limited.  The national backbone of the time was 
NSFnet, and consisted of a half-dozen T3's with T1's hanging off of them.

The web is a far different place now than my first pages were authored for.
I didn't know what to put.  I did know what I didn't want to put.
I didn't want flash.  Image.  Style.  I wanted substance.  Use.  Something
really there.

Today's web is not the place for that.

So, instead of fancy hypertext, I'm writing this.  Plain English, plain
text.  

In web years, I'm ancient.  I saw the web in 1992, and have seen it grow
beyond description every year since then.  Many of you that are new, and
never saw the old web, wouldn't miss it.  You like glitz; most people do.
That's why it's so popular.  To the 10% of you that would have appreciated
it, I'm sorry.  The web is the T.V. of the Internet now.  Commercial and 
dumb.



I had been trying to redo my web page for weeks, when I ran accross this
page:   http://www.astro.umd.edu/~sgeier/phase_out.html
It inspired me to stop trying to make my web pages fit into the "new" web,
and to write this page instead.

If you do want to stay involved with the web (as I expect all of you will),
then please look this over:  http://www.crl.com/~subir/lynx/meaning.html
Make pages with substance.  With something real to them, not just a facade,
like most of the web is.  And make them with portable HTML.

Thank you, and good bye,
  -- Jacob