The Ozzard of Wiz, aka Peter Crowther

The What of Who?

In January 1990, I obtained the source to TinyMUD version 1.4.1 alpha as it flew past on USENET - this was before the World Wide Web existed. I ran the game, and UglyMUG is still going.

Initially, my online identity was simply Wizard. However, that all changed once the Internet reached the game and we could see (gasp!) other sites. I had to pick a name. "The Wizard of Oz" was a bit obvious, so I spoonerised and came up with "The Ozzard of Wiz". It seems to have stuck.

Vanity Publishing

I believe that the expansion of the World Wide Web has been driven by two of the Christian 'seven deadly sins': vanity and greed. Vanity on the part of individuals, like myself, who have decided to inflict their opinions, interests and creations on the wider world; greed on the part of companies who can see expanded business opportunities from the rich content and interaction that is possible in the current Web.

Blogs are possibly the epitome of vanity publishing: the thought that someone, somewhere out there, wishes to plough through your ramblings, guided by little other than chronology. The immediacy is sometimes striking, but they are somewhat lacking as ways of communicating ideas. Well, maybe I'm just someone who naturally organises and reviews my thoughts...

Standards

While the expansion of the Web has been driven by the various sins, the initial standard of HTML has been attacked from all sides as special interest groups try to use ubiquity of their protocols and features as a commercial weapon - greed at work again. The World Wide Web Consortium acts as the United Nations of the Web world, trying to form consensus in the face of unilateral actions from organisations around the world. Like the UN, the result is rarely spectacularly good, but it probably prevents much larger problems.

This site adheres to the two main current W3C presentation standards, XHTML and CSS. I still need to add accessibility tags to the pages - and my apologies to anyone who's reading this site via a screen reader. However, the site should at least be functional for any browser. If not, let me know and I'll do my best to fix it for you!