Middle school websites

In honor of John Knowles, late author of "A Separate Peace," I visited my old school not long ago. Not in person — Good Lord, no. I used the Internet.

When I was a student there, my middle school lacked what you would call a Web presence. You could only experience it in person, as an industrial-looking fortress of blue buttresses and rivets propping up walls the color of the USS Missouri, festooned with seagull droppings, plexiglass gates flung open twice a day to reveal a row of lockers and a paved walkway pitted with chewing gum that students contributed to the architecture over the decades. There was a rumor that Balboa used to be a women's prison, but it wasn't true.

The Web version of the Balboa (or "Balboner," a wry local nickname) experience wisely avoids trying to recapture this much-loved "lived-in" quality. Instead it evokes an epic struggle for meaning in a chilling world, breaking up empty expanses of white with whimsical clip art of apples sitting on books:

Every sixth-grader senses instinctively that to leave an apple, even a monochrome one, on a teacher's books will only make things much worse than they have to be later on during Industrial Arts. So this image, so small and inadequate, can only be taken as a stark reminder that innocence is over.

Besides clip art paying homage to Apple II graphics circa "Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego," there is also a very frank link revealing detailed Web traffic statistics at ExtremeTracking.com, as well as a defiant "Made on a Mac" button sitting between twin "Remember the World Trade Center" images, some old-fashioned shaded table borders, and an animated "mail to" icon of a hand in the futile act of trying to write a letter, only to see it disappear over and over again.

You see, you don't need the Archive.org Wayback Machine to save from the ravages of time your memories of the Home Page Era (1995-1997), whose cut-off date is roughly around the time advertisements stopped including the "http://".

Thanks to your local public school district, you can revisit a do-it-yourself Info Highway that's forever "under construction" (with gifs to match), where shocking new visions of interface design are explored unafraid, all links are cool or hot, Web designers aren't too shy to ask that you "wait for the music to load" and every mailbox icon is jumping and twitching like a black-and-white ruffed lemur.

But where a great public school website achieves something that sets it apart from a Geocities Homestead site dedicated to Better Than Ezra and not updated since the '90s is in the perverse genius of navigation. The cunningly wrought Balboa hyperlinks are no exception.

Say you're a parent, and you want information. Which night should you leave open for the Perfect Attendance Awards? What are your options now that your child has been expelled for empathizing with Dylan Klebold? Naturally, you click "Parent Information," with its Hieronymus Bosch-like icon of a condemned nuclear family fleeing unspeakable beasts of the netherworld.

But what you get when you click on "Parent Information" is a list of links including:

Run, Sandee. Don't look back, it's too late to save your older brother! Anyway, this is only one of many school websites that masters the phone tree engineer's art of diverting you from actual people in offices, instead pointing you in the direction of Laura Bush and the National Weather Service.

In Modesto, Calif., for instance, a button supposedly linking from the Board of Education to hot one-stop education portal "MCSOnline" slyly points you away from Modesto City Schools and lands you via sleight-of-mouse at Music Copyright Solutions (www.mcsonline.com), where a splash page enjoins you to "demand more from music publishing."

Forget College Application Night — come to think of it, what the hell ever happened to those songwriting royalties Steven Tyler owes you?

— John Gorenfeld (john@flakmag.com)