Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Netscape 4 Revisited

I hope this is the last post on this subject! I felt the need to look at this again because the redirecting of Netscape 4 users just wasn’t working properly on this site. There are some browsers out there that seemed to be fooling the browser switcher javascript. In any case it didn’t seem very polite to send Netscape 4 users off to another site so I have looked again at other ways.

Fortunately, I have a copy of Eric Meyers’s excellent book - Cascading Stylesheets - O’Reilly—and I came across a suggested way of giving Netscape users an alternative stylesheet. It turns out that you can link an external stylesheet by two methods: using link or using @import. Netscape 4.xx doesn’t recognise the latter so by using both methods you can fool Netscape 4 into using the former!

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Thursday, February 20, 2003

Photo WEB Blogs

Here’s some news: I’m running a ‘community’ photo post for Oxford. Part of the bid to be European Capital of Culture!

I have deliberated on this area for a while now, checking out various pieces of software and experimenting with pMachine. I have now opted for ‘PhotoPost’, a set of PHPscripts running with mySQL database. After some hacking to get it to look OK (I’m still keen to make a few other changes) I have now gone live, Check it out.

What is ‘PhotoPost’?

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Wednesday, January 22, 2003

Designing for the screen

There are plenty of books and commentaries on the subject of design for the web and design for interactive media. It sure is crucial that the concept of interactivity is thought of as a differentiator in designing for the computer screen rather than paper, but what about those basic things like getting things to look good in the space. What about ‘balance’, ‘harmony’, ‘proportion’. We need to consider some of these fundemental layout design concepts. Forget all that for a moment: Let’s forget about interactivity, structure, usability and other such important issues relating to delivery of content on a computer screen and consider the blank space, the rectangular space. Take a blank piece of paper and pretend that you need to arrange a heading, a logo, some text and a couple of graphics in that space. Where do you start?

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Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Idea Drawing

Ways to help think through ideas and compelling ways to communicate them.  Being a visual person myself, I have always doodled on paper when I am trying to figure an idea out. Projects like web site design or CDROM interfaces do not just result in visual designs but complex arrangements of links between different data.  Developing concepts for these types of ‘new media’ projects will inevitably include representing the designs (both style and structure) visually.  To help us design for the computer as medium there are some good techniques for building visual representations, and some very powerful software tools are available.

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Saturday, January 18, 2003

Scroll On!

My art school teacher and friend, Robert Janz, once complained of a museum where he had seen a Chinese scroll painting mounted in a glass cabinet. Only one small section of the landscape narrative was ever visible to the viewers and the kinetic experience was lost.  I was reminded of this when I started to think about the way we scroll our web browsers to see the content ‘below the fold’ of our computer screens and digital handhelds. It seems that we are happy to have the choice to scroll a lot but we don’t want to be forced scroll a little bit!  Has the Ancient Chinese way of presenting narrative through the scrolling painting resurfaced in a new digital paradigm?

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