The Online POV-Ray Tutorial

About the Tutorial's Design

A lot of thinking went into the design of the Online POV-Ray Tutorial. After discussion, we developed three major design guidelines:

To take advantage of the abilities HTML presents;
To constrain presentation methods to the simple and intuitive; and
To design with the slow network in mind.

By the first, we mean that design should be based upon the original goal of HTML: to provide a clean method of presenting information portable over various output devices. The authors feel that far too often Web page designers lose track of this and attempt to use HTML as some kind of page layout system with multimedia extensions, which it is most definitely not.

By the second, we mean recognizing the difference between situations that help the user to understand the information and situations that hinder the user with confusing data. The authors' favorite example is that of HTML frames: when done wrong (as is easy to do) frames quickly become a nightmare for the user. When done right, however, frames become an extremely valuable tool. The authors feel that their implementation of frames in the Tutorial meets this guideline, and is as small and user-friendly as possible.

By the third, we mean keeping the cutesy stuff to a minumum. The authors all have extensive experience with slow networks and know very well the frustration of waiting for unnecessary animations or large images to load; furthermore, given the relative income of the targeted population (students and their schools) with respect to hardware, the authors feel that more likely than not many users of the Tutorial will be subject to the same speed constraints they have been.

As such, the Tutorial has taken on several noticeable design characteristics:

It has stayed away from large images (except when specifically requested). Not only are they not portable across differently-sized screens (violation of design principle #1) but are also slow (violation of design principle #2);
It has stayed away from image maps. They provide a slower, clumsier version of what is already possible (violation of design principle #2);
It has stayed stayed away from dinky animations and scrolling text displays. They bloat loading time with unnecessary information (violation of design principle #2).
It has done everything possible to make the information presented clear, fast, and easily accessible.

The result is that the Tutorial is not as cutesy as it could be. There are no animations or music; there is a lot of text and it is all the same size and color. There are small images, when needed to illustrate a point. There are large images, but only when specifically requested by the user. There are Java applets and CGI scripts, but only when the information must be interactive, or could not have been presented as intuitively another way.

More importantly, the Tutorial is portable, compact, and fast. This is not an advertisement for some multimedia company, it is a serious piece of on-line reference material and contains a lot of information. We are not catering to your Saturday-morning-cartoon-bred need for jumping frogs and scrolling LED displays, we are providing you with serious information when and where you need it. If this means sacrificing a few image maps and animations for a little more speed and portability, so be it.

We feel that the final design of the Tutorial has met our guidelines fully, and that serious web users will not only find the Tutorial informative and useable, but will appreciate the work we have put into the design as well as the data.