David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start & Design for Hackers.
Last night, I watched Swimming Pool (Amazon), a rather ambiguous movie a la Mulholland Drive (Amazon) or 8 1/2 (Amazon). I enjoy such movies because they make wonderful vehicles for discussion. Of the many interesting posts on this movie, I think the interpretation that the Julia we see for most of the movie is Sarah’s creation makes the most sense.
I have added a background pattern and framed the content with my parody of the ever-popular drop shadow. I’m tempted to resist the aqua-esque design trend and stick with pixel-by-pixel designs. I feel that it gives a good understanding to how all of the pixels work together, and while exaggerated, expresses the limitations of this medium.
Whenever I do work, or see work, that acknowledges the limitations of the pixel through exaggeration, it reminds me of the de Stijl movement, not only because the forms they derived from the principles of de Stijl are rectilinear, but because, in some cases, the form seems to derive from the limitations of the medium at hand. Granted, Mondrian’s paintings are counter-expressive of the inherent qualities of paint in contrast to the work of Van Gogh or Jackson Pollack, but seeing a piece such as Theo van Doesburg‘s logo for de Stijl
Makes me suspect that maybe having a typecase full of only fonts and rectangular rules may have had a strong influence on its final form.
No kidding! Call their support and listen to the recording.
The Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts Table has (sort of) unlocked for me a way to browse almost entirely on my keyboard. I always loved how Firefox would highlight text links just by typing the first few letters of that link, and I always valued the ability to switch browser tabs on Safari using Cmd+Shift+arrow, but I could never get Firefox to switch tabs.
Funny though, that if you follow this table and press Ctrl+T in Firefox on a mac, it will NOT produce a new tab for you. This, I wouldn’t even notice, because I normally just register “Ctrl” to mean “Cmd” on a Mac, since that’s how it’s keyboard shortcuts usually translate from a PC, so as I would expect, one must press Cmd+T to produce a new tab on a Mac, however, Cmd+Tab does not switch tabs as one who uses this logic would expect. In this case, when they say “Ctrl,” they mean “Ctrl.” Press Ctrl+Tab and Firefox will switch tabs.
What do I have against using a mouse? Mice are primitive (mouse alternatives), and I find them especially uncomfortable given that I use a computer most of the day. To do the things I can’t accomplish on my keyboard, I rely on a Wacom Tablet.
Until this week, rdgusa.com, which I am the webmaster of, had been getting alot of annoying spambot traffic from one spambot in particular (for background on our method of determining what a spambot is, read up on the mod_rewrite method). Finally I got fed up with this spambot visiting the site every day, looked up the IP address and contacted the tech contact, simply telling them I was getting spambot behavior from this particular IP address. Later that day, I got an e-mail from the “offending” customer, who was oblivious as to what was going on. Oddly, the “offending” customer was the Catholic Diocese of a capital city (RDG is a leader in Catholic Church Architecture, so this was a potential client). I checked the log files, and noticed that the offending IP address had visited once, with human-like behavior, then a few days later started coming as a robot, accessing, but disobeying the robots.txt file at which point I started blocking it. I was fairly certain that this Catholic Diocese wasn’t running a spambot, so I concluded that there must have been some sort of Trojan Horse that had taken over one of their computers, going through it’s internet history and harvesting e-mail addresses from all of the sites in it. I informed the tech contact of this organization, and sure enough, he found a Trojan Horse on one of his user’s computers. I was unaware that spammers used this method, and I thought the world should know about it.
Destrukshun has brought to my attention a great collection Josef Müller-Brockman‘s posters. They’re showing in Dublin, so seeing them on the online will have to do.
Nathan Sharfi has pointed out that the CSS3 Specifications have a feature called psuedo-elements that will behave just like my proposed use. I suppose what Luke desires is to specify containment of divs through the style sheet, but to still be able to assign content to the divs through the markup. That would be handy indeed, and would enable true re-designs through stylesheet changes. I feel a bit foolish for not having been familiar with this feature of the CSS3 spec, but that is how you learn.
After further consideration, I have noticed that there is a possible issue with “element nesting” as I have described it below. Luke Redpath proposes still including all of the DIV tags in your markup. In my proposed use, there is no indication in the markup of any “wrap1,” “wrap2,” elements. So it seems that in trying to take presentation out of the markup, perhaps I have inserted markup into the presentation, meaning that the presence of the “wrap1” etc. elements derive from them being indicated in the stylesheet. This is something I’m sure the W3C could figure out. It wouldn’t work right out of the box as I’ve proposed it, but you get the idea.
I just read an article with a pretty intriguing proposal in it. If I understand it correctly, Luke Redpath proposes that the next CSS specification include an ability to specify that an element contain other elements by default. This would be an ideal way to create visual effects that would otherwise require extraneous DIV tags. For example, for the technique, Onion Skinned Drop Shadows, the code would look something like this:
.wrap1, .wrap2, .wrap3 {
display:inline-table;
/* \*/display:block;/**/
}
.wrap3 {
padding:0 4px 4px 0;
background:url(corner_tr.gif) right
top no-repeat;
}
/* CSS rules from the future */
.wrap1 {
contain: .wrap2
float:left;
background:url(shadow.gif) right
bottom no-repeat;
}
.wrap2 {
contain: .wrap3
background:url(corner_bl.gif) left
bottom no-repeat;
}
img .shadow {
contain: .wrap1
}
/* end CSS rules from the future */ Now, instead of your markup looking like this:
<div class="wrap1"> <div class="wrap2"> <div class="wrap3"> <img src="object.gif" alt="The object casting a shadow" /> </div> </div> </div>
It would look like this:
<img class="shadow" src="object.gif" alt="The object casting a shadow" />
I think this would be a big step toward separating presentation from content.