The web has become saturated with 'blogs'. Since about 1999 this phenomena has grown and grown. Why should we blog? Is this the new way to create for the web? Should we throw away all our HTML skills? If you want to create stuff for the web then you should become totally immersed in the medium. You need to spend as much time 'surfing' (a term that seems a little dated now!) as you do poking around with Flash, HTML or other code! If you do spend a lot of time browsing for things that interest you, then you will have noticed that a lot of people are posting to their web sites in a particular way. This way is known as 'blogging'.
I was inspired to put together this presentation on Web Standards after reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s ‘Designing with Web Standards’, New Riders, 2003. This book needs to be on all web designers shelves, alongside Jeffrey Veen’s marvellous ‘The Art and Science of Web Design’, New Riders, 2001.
In the days when Hypercard was the only authoring tool around, we got used to the idea of presenting information ‘one screen at a time’. Hypercard, like other authoring tools that followed needed a metaphor to help us think of screens of information. Hypercard used the card metaphor. A bunch of cards was called a stack. So we thought in terms of a pile of cards and we presented them one after the other.
The words montage and collage seem to be used frequently to describe the same thing. I certainly find myself using the terms interchangeably. The definitions found on dictionary.com are thus:
Collage: An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color.
Montage: A single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or designs.
It seems that montage is more often applied to 'superimposing', whereas collage seems to apply to 'pasting over'.
First time users of Adobe Acrobat don’t think of it as a ‘multimedia authoring’ tool, because, open it up and nothing appears! No blank page on which draw or create is presented. No tool bar with objects to be dragged onto the screen is available.
To use Acrobat, a PDF needs to be created in some other application first. Could be Microsoft Word or Adobe Illustrator, or, my preference, InDesign.
Once we have the PDF, what can we do beyond basic ‘page turning’?
Acrobat can easily deliver multiple page PDF documents with its built-in forward, backwards, and return icons. The PDF format, however, can be enhanced to include much more:
