Thursday, May 08, 2003

Embryonic eBooks

embryonic because the eBook still feels a bit ‘under development’. These days new words are being added to the dictionary under the letter ‘e’. It’s easy; just add e - eInk, ePaper, eLife, eworld, eMedia - etc. Not to be outdone the letter ‘i’ is also in for new family members: iBook, iPhoto, iLink.  Note the use of the second letter capital - another addition to written English (or should it be eEnglish?).  The eBook has it’s own semantic problems because you can’t be sure whether someone is using the term in the context of a device or the actual content: so - ‘I read War and Peace on my eBook’ means that they used an ebook device (see below). But, ‘I don’t bother with paper books anymore; I just read eBooks’. In this context, the eBook is a piece of fiction or non-fiction.  But what is the difference between a piece of interactive media like a CD-ROM and an eBook?

Continue reading

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

XML in Photoshop 7 Jpegs

What a pain! I have had a significant amount of hassle from this problem:

Photoshop 7 adds XML content to saved jpgs. Now this only happens if you DON’T use the ‘save for web’ feature and so probably goes unnoticed to most.

A jpeg with added XML data will crash Internet Explorer 6 on PC. Not version 5 and not any version on MAC. I said crash but actually it is even more serious than that becasue Internet Explorer will not load another image until you restart! So if you FTP a jpeg to your site be sure to use the ‘save for web’ menu.

Continue reading

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!

Continue reading

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’?

Continue reading

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?

Continue reading