*click* dream
You know how sometimes when you're dreaming you know you are dreaming and because you know you are dreaming you can stop dreaming that dream or change how it's going?
Last night I dreamed I didn't like the dream I was dreaming, so I in my dream I just clicked the close button of the window in which I was dreaming. That worked just fine.
Yami dreamed in maroon Verdana.
Jun 9, 2002 @ 17:14 » no comments » General
Powers of ten
Cool. Powers of ten.
Jun 10, 2002 @ 10:11 » no comments » General
CSS and how to define horizontal rules (HR)
Just what you wanted to know...
Since W3C says that the NOSHADE, SIZE and WIDTH attributes of the horizontal rule are now deprecated, you probably wonder how to define them in CSS. Right?
I've been through the CSS1 and CSS2 specs a couple of times, but unless I'm mistaken, there is no mention of the HR tag and how to treat it in CSS. Using a Google search of the w3.org domain, I eventually dug up a very helpful mailinglist message. Turns out Mozilla treats a horizontal rule as if it were a box and the background-color attribute defines the color of the horizontal rule inside that box. If you want 1px high solid black horizontal rules, this definition works for me:
hr {height: 1px;
border-style: none;
color: black;
background-color: black;
}
You need the color: black in there for IE, Opera 6.01 draws a 1px solid black line with either the color or background-color, or both.
[update 2003-03-17: some more references about styling the HR tag]
Jun 14, 2002 @ 21:41 » 2 comments » General
Updating the Resources section
I've been working hard on the Resources section of the site. Just thought I'd mention that in case you missed it. The MovableType blog tool proves to be very versatile. I mentioned before that with MT you can use categories to sort your entries and I've been busy putting all the references I've amassed in plain hardcoded html into that system. I'm not done, but it's real easy now to add or edit something, save the changes and the webpages are updated automagically.
A note on the redesign. I'm proud to say that the design appears to work in all major browsers (IE 5 & 6, Netscape 6, Mozilla, Opera 6) and last time I checked, mostly worked cross-platform on Windows PC's and Macs. The site uses CSS extensively so that for the most part content and form are separated. Older browsers like Netscape 4 will still display the content, but without the layout and users are informed that their browser is a bit out of date. The site also works pretty well in a text-only browser, such as Lynx, so that access for people with a visual impairment is possible.
I would not have been able to work this up without the help of Owen Briggs, who maintains several indispensible CSS tutorials here and here, and who was kind enough to answer a couple of e-mails. Glish.com's tutorial helped a lot too, as did A List Apart's archive.
Anyway, now I've got to go and clean up some of the old html pages, because you can still end up there following some of the links and they look so crappy.
Jun 16, 2002 @ 21:02 » 1 comment » General
Book distribution going slow
Hmm... it's close to a month since my book came back from the printer, but the international distribution hasn't started yet... what's taking them so long to make the book available to the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble?
Jun 16, 2002 @ 21:04 » no comments » General
Hmm...
Thinking about some exciting things that MovableType's categories will make possible for this blog. I'm not telling yet though... }:-P
Tired already of me gushing on about categories and MT?
Jun 17, 2002 @ 21:40 » no comments » General
Major cool factor
David Silver's RCCS (Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies) got mentioned on Bruce Sterling's weblog. How cool is that?!
Jun 18, 2002 @ 10:54 » no comments » Research
"One squall stoop man, One leper mannequin"
Here's an older (1999) but hilarious report of how a voice recognition package kept misunderstanding the tester. Turns out the software could not fit the male tester's tenor voice in the voice recognition patterns associated with male speakers. Setting the software to expect a 15 year old girl did the trick though, and suddenly the software and the tester were on speaking terms again.
Another small example of how gender not only structures social interaction, but how it, in often rather implicit ways, influences the design of our everyday artifacts.
Jun 19, 2002 @ 12:22 » no comments » Research
Bishounen
Bishounen. Interesting. Although I like manga and anime, I'm not a hardcore fan. More like an interested but casual observer and although I'd noticed the occasional androgynous character, I missed the fact that there's more to bishounen than just a particular style of drawing.
Jun 19, 2002 @ 14:33 » no comments » Research
Only 8 bits, but all the fun
8Bit Joystick.com, a fun little blog/games site. They just published a review of the classic 1986 NES game Deadly Towers.
Jun 20, 2002 @ 18:14 » 1 comment » Research
Some gender related links
Some gender related links I had open for a week in Opera, so they had to go somewhere:
Revenge of the Gamer Chick
GamerChickPlanet, messageboard
Gender Blur
Hazel's Room, women in gaming
And some unrelated links:
How to survive your PhD
Furniture Whores and Debit Card Toilets
Jun 21, 2002 @ 14:44 » no comments » Research
What is a web page?
I just can't stop thinking about this one thing Owen Briggs remarked in a mail: "We haven't defined what a webpage 'looks' like yet." We were talking about fluid and scalable web page designs and then he just drops that one. Says the web is a new medium and right now we're just being bogged down by the thousands of years of print design, which prevents us from thinking outside the box with regard to web page design.
What then is a good example of a web design thinking outside the box? (Disregarding for a moment that of course the center pillar of all layout techniques actually is the Box, whether in html tables, the CSS box model or print in most cases.) Especially, are there any blogs out there that manage to put a fairly rigid type of content in an exciting new design?
I've been visiting hundreds of blogs over the past week or so, but hardly any surprising designs. I've checked out the blogs of the hip, totally CSS and standards aware crowd, of the webdesigners and of the techies, but apart from great attention to detail, fabulous W3C standards compliance, superb scalability and accessibility it's all basic one, two or three column layout. We may not have defined what a web page looks like yet, but they pretty much all look the same. (And this site is no exception...)
Maybe the blog is not the right type of content to spark wild new design, but since it's being hailed as a revolution in web usage, I figured I'd look there first. Which sparks another question: Does the current format of weblogs dictate a certain type of content? Or does the content dictate the design in this case? Or is it simply convention: a weblog is a weblog if and only if you have some sort of column layout with timestamped messages and an archive? If we have trouble thinking about fluid design, as Owen says, does that mean we also have trouble thinking about fluid content? Or is content always fluent and does it flow automatically into the boxes we design? And what is the role of the ingrained use of the spatial metaphor to organise information and information navigation here?
The question then still seems to be not what a web page is, but what a web page can be. Any good links or ideas? Leave a comment! I'm especially interested in blog-type pages that break out of the conventional boundaries.
Jun 25, 2002 @ 11:53 » no comments » Webdesign
Kermit gets star on Walk of Fame
Ah, this one's good. Kermit gets a star on the Walk of Fame! Details over at BBC news and CNN. Miss Piggy will be so proud! (Piggy Blog?)
Jun 25, 2002 @ 12:17 » no comments » General