Making a prediction about the state of the Internet is like guessing how close to Earth the asteroid 1997xf11 will come in 2028. Some of the best astrophysicists and astronomers in the world are trying to calculate an exact trajectory, but no one really knows whether or not armageddon is coming. The only thing absolutely apparent is the hype and the hearsay. And that’s what it’s like online; even a rocket scientist couldn’t figure it out.

There are some questions that do have answers: Are more people getting online? Yes. Is the industry growing at a phenomenal rate? Yes. Is everybody trying to get in on a piece of the action? Absolutely.

But how many people are online in Canada? What web sites are the most popular? Is the spirit of Independence and altruism still alive? Do people still develop "content" without worrying about revenue models? And how do writers, photographers, songwriters and digital artists feel about having their creativity repurposed as content and repackaged to serve up as low-bandwidth fodder for the punters coming in as traffic?

These are human issues. And the purpose of this column is to talk about life on the Internet (not to be confused with my many colleagues whose lives are the 'net). The online world should be a tool used to improve your offline life. Getting wired doesn’t necessarily make you a happier person. But c:/dos isn’t about telling you why you shouldn’t use the net. I want you to use your browser better and understand the significance of your clicks.

Every major site you visit keeps track of your clicks, your browser, and a LOT of other information. That’s how "official statistics" are gathered. And many reputable organizations’ facts and figures are so disparate and incongruous that they can’t possibly be believed. The truth is not out there.

But there is fun to be had. And there’s a lot for all of us to learn.

The new, improved site, brought to you by 3 frazzled programmers, a database wizard, 2 crazy designers, 6 content producers, a visionary and the letter W. No animals were hurt during the production of this web site.

In January, the Exploration Network’s Enterprise Research & Development (E-NERD) Internet team was commissioned to redesign exn.net for Netstar Interactive (our parent company). We were given a strict set of criteria and a vague relaunch date of April 1st. No joke, we were told. We were going to relaunch as exn.ca, Canada’s science website.

The planning stage was an immense undertaking.

Our concerns: bandwidth, usability, audience and content. We also had to keep in mind scalability, so we can eventually grow into the next generation of this site instead of drastically reworking the architecture again.

To paraphrase David Siegel, Web sites today aren’t like the ones your parents used to make.

Led by WebGod Paul Kaliciak, the Weekly Webster himself, E-NERD experimented with many different approaches. 27 versions of our home page were born, horribly savaged and killed during a 3-month span. We wanted to be responsible members of the 'net community, but decided that if our visitors’ browsers didn’t support frames, we wouldn’t support them.

But by not supporting frames, we would also be cutting off disabled users. And suddenly accessibility became an issue. This will be a topic for a future column. For now, rest assured in knowing we provide for our frameless friends by having a text-only version, constantly updated with our newest stories.

From the beginning, we knew that Allaire’s Cold Fusion would be used to manage our content because it allowed us to use all the buzzwords in our press releases.

Static pages? No way! Dynamic page generation was the only way to go. It allows distinct visitors to experience unique sessions with pages pulled from our object-oriented, SQL database. Thus, visitors can learn more about convergence in a low-bandwidth environment (without needing broadband) as they download live streaming video in RealVideo over our 2 fiberoptic T1 connections to the World Wide Web. Regardless of their browser version, javascript code will dynamically adapt to their environment, producing a seamless multi-platform multi-media presentation for our entire audience.

While creating this publicist’s dream, we all learned about esthetics, programming and teamwork. When we started, there were theoretical objectives we wanted to meet which none of us had any practical experience actually doing. Overcoming the challenges was disappointing at times, but also fun and eventually satisfying. There were also some surprises along the way. We posted to discussion groups and listserves with our problems. The response was astonishing.

Dozens of educated, experienced web programmers and designers were willing to help, without any expectation of compensation. Some just offered suggestions, but a few went further. Marian Dumitrascu of Romania rewrote a Cold Fusion custom tag, allowing us to generate dynamic images. And Jean-Guy Vachon of Terran Communications debugged the IE4+ specific DHTML that goes whiz-bang on our front page. Our brothers from tsn.ca also offered their spiritual guidance.

With all the facts and figures and money being thrown about, who would have thought altruism lives online? The web community truly has no borders. From Bucharest to Bangor (where we bought our navigation applet from OpenCube), the world came together to build exn.ca.

Brought to you by the Discovery Channel Canada, exn.ca is your home for science, nature, technology and adventure. Check it out and enjoy.