Some of the ways it is ugly are technical – or just down to me not being a designer – there are things I won’t do because they will cause serious pain to some users. Thinks like huge tables just to do layout (which delays rendering for a lot of folk). Binding to a particular screen resolution, or needing odd plugins or security-compromising client-side scripting just to get to the content is just uncivilised – and you’re poking people (and search engines) in the eye. We have a few regular users who come from WebTV boxes; I’m surprised by that, but that’s all about not poking people in the eye. Whenever I grab hold of a new Web browsing device (a phone or PDA, typically) I have a play and I practically always find it looks different and works fine. That’s the Web to me. It isn’t about AAA compliance, just about throwing out techniques that break and never getting too hung up on things looking a little different. Design is by suggestion (in CSS), not tyrrany.

At other times it is philosophical; I firmly believe things need names. Names that go in the URL, titles and optional descriptions. I believe in text in the page, because it’s all we’ve really got as a handle for search.

I do keywords in a way that is slightly out of kilter with the modern folksonomy people; to me a keyword has meaning, beyond the word or two that are the name of the keyword. That again means more text underneath pictures. I could shunt it to some sub-page, but there’s always a certain amount that wants to be right there – a title at the very least.

The biggest problem with gallery, though, is the language – particularly when walking someone through some forms and that’s going to mean I need to try it against some more users.