Live with it.
You have have noticed that there are some pretty large pieces of text here, with few pictures. Those of you who have read books (remember those?) before should have no problem with this. Those of you expecting graphics might say that large pieces of text are rude, and you should be warned about them.
Let's see, between a 44K GIF image and a 44K piece of text that describes much of what I want to get across, I'd stick with the text. Besides, most modern modems can compress things on the fly -- provided that they're not already compressed (like most images). And nobody gives warnings about large graphics these days anyway, so why should I warn you about text? Are you afraid of actually having to read something?
I did break down and write a couple CGI programs, but they have their uses, and they're meant to make accessing the information you want easier. I hope you find them tasteful, and, more importantly, useful.
You may have noticed that Best Viewed With Any Browser button (or, if you're using a text-only browser, it's a link) at the top of the main page. I take that very seriously. I try to avoid tables and other such physical markup whenever possible.
The Internet is the most heterogeneous computing environment out there, and a web page could be viewed by absolutely anyone on any platform. If we all adhere to the standards promulgated by the W3C then vendors (theoretically) won't have incentives to add their own "extensions" (*ahem*) to well-established protocols. This will help to ensure that the web caters to people, not platforms.
Any half-decent document preparation system will allow people to separate content from appearance, so you can modify one without touching the other, and it will all still work together in a reasonably attractive manner. The addition of style sheets to HTML makes the web a lot better than it used to be in this respect. In addition to making web pages easier to maintain by promoting modularity -- something any reasonable programmer should understand -- style sheets have the incredible potential to make web pages non-ugly in browsers that don't pay attention to them. (Weird, huh?) Now all we have to do is convince people to use the tools at their disposal.
I test all of these pages in several browsers. Currently, I tend to use Opera and W3M at work, and OmniWeb at home. I'll also run Lynx and Mozilla occasionally, to make sure things don't look totally broken. If they do, please let me know.
Note that ugly and broken are two different words, and thus two different concepts.
Mail to me about how my sense of design sucks and needs more graphics and gadgets and blinkenlights will be ignored or flamed, at my discretion. :-)