Recently in Interactive Category
The latest version of Microsoft's browser for Windows XP and Vista is available for download. Oh, the horror.
Abraham Maslow famously said that "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Closer to home, it would seem that for Adobe Systems, every web site is starting to look like an application. We're further and further away from the company's early 80s origins, based on the brilliant PostScript page description language developed by founders Warnock and Geske. But who can blame Adobe? There's an undeniable attraction to playing in the big leagues of application development, along with Microsoft and Google.
As I wrote in Are You Deprecated, I've been making a valiant effort to shake off my antiquated Web page coding habits, which date back to the days of Notepad and Netscape 0.9. With most of my more horrendous old practices now behind me, I've turned to looking for solutions to display problems in new places. Hence my recent, if belated, arrival in the land of Dynamic HTML and fancier CSS. If, like me, your main focus is graphics and publishing, with just a secondary need to create and maintain Web sites, then the good news is that you can use these to quickly add snappy, modern functionality to your pages without making it your life's work.
With Internet Explorer 7 out for some weeks now, I'm confident that you've installed it and gone through your Web design projects to ensure they all render properly. And if you came across any shortcomings, you carefully went through Microsoft's developer support material and quickly brought any offending pages up to speed. Needless to say, whatever process you employ to track browser usage has been updated, so that you can keep an eye on the accelerating number of version 7 users visiting your sites. What's that? You say you didn't know 7 was available yet? And you have no intention of ever installing it or even checking your pages for version 7 compliance? Sir, you sound to me like a die-hard Firefox user and to you I say: Shame!
This is the moment to confess a secret passion for affiliate programs. It began almost ten years ago when I set up and managed an affiliate program for one of my first community-driven graphics sites. At the time BeFree (later acquired by Commission Junction) was the state of the art in affiliate system management. It performed admirably, allowing me to construct a large network of affiliates that contributed significantly to the traffic and sales performance of the site. Of course, this was in the pre-Google AdWord era, so sites had fewer options to monetize their traffic. In fact, you might think that Google has pretty much killed off the affiliate concept. But that's far from being the case.
Have you ever been deprecated? Well, I have. In fact, it happened just this weekend. Racing to get a Web page completed, I lost patience tweaking the CSS style I was employing to position an element correctly at several screen resolutions, in both Explorer and Firefox. So I slapped in a <center> tag and called it a day. I'm not proud of what I did. In fact, that very same legacy page contains more than a few stray <p> and <br> tags, not to mention a shocking number of border, width and even hspace attributes. Oh, the shame of it all.
It's every agency's dream. You've created a hip, edgy campaign that uses the net in a savvy way to generate a tidal-wave of buzz about your client's product. Sure, you had to bend the truth a bit on the promotional mini-site you created. But wrapping a product in a tissue of deception and manipulation is just another day's work, right? Or perhaps the recent failure of such a promotional site to generate more than a flicker of interest is a reminder that honesty might—gasp—be the best policy.
Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans serif. Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans serif. Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans serif. Sound monotonous? We're currently doomed to visit site after site that employs a similar string of sans serif font definitions. Almost as monotonous is the serif equivalent: Times New Roman, Times, serif. Either way, the end result is millions of cookie-cutter typographic treatments on a global scale and an increasing banalization of the visitor experience. After all, if every magazine, every book, every poster, every ad, could only draw on a few tired faces, how effective would be the role of the print designer?
People seem to keep pointing me to domains of activity that I had no idea existed. Most recently my son introduced me to the subculture devoted to the cult of Chuck Norris, as expressed by this snippet of machinima using the Elder Scrolls: Oblivian engine. Who knew? The thing is, we don't know what we don't know. We rely on others to say, "Hey, look over here, you need to know this." It's on that principle that O'Reilly's venerable "cookbook" series is based, using a question-solution-discussion format the publisher has applied to a wide of development and graphics topics.
