From the Online Editor

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Ray Quay
 

Editorial

I am pleased to provide for the second year an online version of the APA National Conference Proceedings. The publication of the printed and online versions of Revolutionary Ideas in Planning hopefully is the start of a regular practice. Deborah Howe, Carl Abbott and Sy Adler in their Journal of the American Planning Association. book review of last year's proceedings made an important point, there is not enough material available that is written by practicing planners for practicing planners.

Much of what is available about the practice of planning is documented through the eyes of professional writers. All to often such a view ignores the reality of stress, sweat, and alienation experienced by most practicing planners and rarely does it celebrate how planners have made their communities better places. Conferences and workshops provide an opportunity for planners to share information and experiences, but such opportunities are rare and expensive. Most planners can not afford such opportunities. In the past, cost and quality were the major critiques of producing conference proceedings. Bruce and Bill have clearly exposed such criticsm as baseless. With this second year of online proceedings, we have demonstrated that distribution of such a publication is possible and cheap! I am pleased that the AICP board has seen the value of such a delivery mechanism by approving the distribution of the proceedings to every participate at the 1999 Seattle Conference on CD-ROM and online. The CD and online versions will be basically identical.

Acknowledgements

I want to extend special thanks to the Herberger Center for Design Excellence, College of Architecture, Arizona State University, The Center and College are the host for the Online Planners Forum which sponsors the proceedings. I also want to thank Bill Pable for providing electronic copies of the articles, Mary Kihl and Karen Fernandez for helping to get APA to recognize the proceedings with a link on their site, and Roger Hedrick and the entire AICP Commission for providing the opportunity to produce an online version of this year's Proceedings. Special thanks is due all the authors for taking the time to write the articles which comprise the proceedings. Their work is truly at the heart of the proceedings.

Finally, I would like to thank Nancy, my family, and the City of Phoenix Planning Department staff for being patient while I was futzing with all these dang HTML files.

Sincerely,

Ray Quay
1/1/99

Technical

Just a few comments on the technical aspects of the online proceedings.

The articles are all provided in HTML, written for HTML 3.0 compliance. They should work with Internet Explorer Versions 3 and higher and Netscape Versions 3 and higher. Some JavaScript is used for navigation buttons and in some cases to open secondary browser windows to display oversize grpahics. The pages are designed to be viewed on at least a 800 x 600 display, though they will display at lower resolutions, some tables and graphics will be difficult to view. The search engine is a client side JavaScript Application.

The pages are located on ASU's web server.