Micropayments at this Site

We use PayPal because they are efficient and secure, and they enable internet payments not only via a credit card but also from your checking account. Either way, once you have your PayPal account set up, you can make purchases by just typing your email and a passwordmuch simpler than typing credit card numbers, and better matched to the internet. Also: Send payments to friends via email, with no charge to either sender or receiver; sell things on eBay, then use your PayPal balance to buy from sellers like us who honor PayPal. From a seller's viewpoint, PayPal's low overhead also allows them to charge less for each transactionthis makes it possible for vendors to sell low-cost products like our $1 pix Pascal system (or iTunes' 99¢ songs). Low-overhead, low-hassle payments are important to the development of internet businesses, because this type of credit-card-free system makes very small payments, or "micropayments", easy for users and economical for businesses.

You can optionally sign up for a PayPal account when you pay for our products. If you opt for this, add a checking account. It involves a few back and forthsthey send you an email, you send them your bank account number, they make a small deposit, and you say how much it is. That's all about security. Ok, now you are set up for the 21st Century...

HTML at this Site

Notice anything about switching from page to page at this site? It's fast. Why? Because... most of the content is text (few images), the HTML is hand-coded for minimal extra junk and for standards compliance, and there are few javascript or other programs running. Thus fewer bytes transmitted through the internet to your computer, thus less waiting.

You will also notice that the text flows to fill your browser window, whether your screen or browser window is narrow or wide (try adjusting your browser window size now). If you buy a spiffy new wide screen, you don't want our web page to end halfway across it. On the other hand, if you're saving money and the environment by sticking with your little old screen, you don't wants to have to scroll each line to read from left to right edge. One of the major ideas of HTML was to adapt to the display; that's how we code it.

Our HTML also: follows a standard known as "HTML 4.01 transitional," minimizes old forms of html code that are "depreciated" (marked to be dropped in the future), and uses no browser-specific code. (Our web payment have slightly higher requirements.) We test our web pages in several versions of several browsers. Developing HTML in this way means that, as the internet continues to evolve, our web content is less likely to "break", that is, to stop displaying properly. It also means that you can use pretty much any browser, including the increasing number of great "third party" (neither Netscape nor Explorer) browsers. Sites with labels like "best viewed with Netscape 6.0" or "best viewed with Microsoft Explorer" just reveal that the web coder is both lazy and is (probably unwittingly) abetting a grab for market share by the browser maker. Browser market share wars ultimately lead to fragmentation and less accessability for everyone. We subscribe to the Viewable With Any Browser philosophy, reflected in the logos below. (However, this site's pages view poorly in really old browsers, e.g., before 3.0.) HTML standards are advanced by a voluntary association called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It has a web copy of the entire HTML 4.01 specification.

"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996