« April 2004 Entries »

A Roadmap to Standards

This afternoon I was asked by a friend what I would recommend to an old designer who wants to learn more about web standards, CSS, XML, and XHTML.

This is a perfect example of when an email response is better posted here for a wider audience (and Google). So here’s my answer: this is a comprehensive, informal, and somewhat long-winded roadmap for anyone who has heard about web standards, thinks they might want web standards, but doesn’t know where to start.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (50) | posted to HTML/XHTML

Happiness Is...

Recent acquisition:

Which brings our household data capacity to a quarter of a terabyte. I’ve long claimed that 5 petabytes is all I’ll ever need, for life. Which provokes bemused expressions on the faces of those around me. No one ever seems to factor in the increasing demand for storage…

My own personal storage history, distributed across drives and systems:

• 1988 - 1994: dual 360k floppies, no hard drive.
• 1994 - 1995: 40MB
• 1995 - 1998: 850MB
• 1998 - 2000: 4,000MB
• 2000 - 2001: 30,000MB
• 2001 - 2003: 70,000MB
• 2003 - 2004: 100,000MB
• 2004: 270,000MB

5 petabytes. It’s all I ask.

Comments Closed (41) | posted to Technology

JPEG Dispute

Fantastic new business model: start a company, but don’t bother producing anything. This is the Age of the Lawsuit! Acquire another company’s intellectual property and sue the pants off of anyone else using code that even faintly smells of your new patents.

In a lawsuit strikingly reminiscent to the current SCO flap, the JPEG image format is under attack by a 300-person strong scheduling software developer (not that suitability or appropriateness would ever come into play in a patent dispute).

Forgent Networks of Austin, TX announced it was suing 31 major hardware and software vendors, including the likes of Canon, Apple, Adobe and HP. Mentioned in the article but not underlined in big red letters is the fact that since they’ve started ‘licensing’ this patent in 2002, over 30 companies have deemed it enough of a threat to pony up a combined $90 million.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a popular image format has come under fire. The GIF format was built on top of a patent owned by Unisys, who promised they’d never actually take advantage of that for profit, and naturally went back on their word when it looked like they needed the money.

The GIF patent expired last year, but perhaps more importantly was the development of a patent-free image format, PNG, which sprung from that particular mess.

What does this new dispute mean for us, the users and consumers of JPEG? It’s too early to say. If the large companies named in the lawsuit pony up a settlement, what’s to stop Forgent from coming after individual users with a new-money afterglow? If the large companies named in the lawsuit fight it and win, what’s to stop Forgent from coming after individual users in embittered retaliation? There are a lot of variables here which can go in many different ways, so the only sure thing is that this is one to watch.

Update: “They can’t go after the users” seems to be a common refrain in response to this post. Time for a mini history lesson: Unisys, the former owner of the GIF patent, did in fact take steps to outline a licensing fee for individual users. Granted, those creating GIFs with software that had been licensed properly were unaffected, but the point remains — it can filter down to users. Never say never.

Comments Closed (24) | posted to Imagery

Safari CSS Effects

After spending weeks on end coding around the quirky demands of today’s browser space, occasionally it’s nice to design for a completely controlled environment.

Mac OS X is proving more and more useful the further I dig in, and lately I’ve been playing with the built-in web server. Apache and PHP come pre-installed, you just have to turn them on.

I’m running my localhost web server from ‘Diemos’, the secondary partition that also stores my project files. Setting up aliases is proving useful, so that while my directory structure looks something like this:

- Projects
    |- Bright
        |- web
    |- mezzoblue
    |- (Other Projects)

- www
    |- bombay
    |- delhi
    |- wiki
    |- zen

- (Other Directories)

…I can point virtual directories outside of the ‘www’ directory, which serves as my root. So throwing all my Bright Creative .php files in /Diemos/Bright/web/ is accessible as http://localhost/bright/. Next step: virtual subdomains so I don’t need to keep setting a root addess variable in PHP.

Anyway. The point of all this is that I put together a very basic page to serve as my test site’s root index. My primary browser is Safari, so I took the opportunity to play with the new text-shadow CSS property. (Hit the thumbnail link if you’re not using Safari). Combining this with a bit of opacity (upcoming in CSS3, supported now) a bit of generated content, and some guaranteed, non-standard font choices, I’ve caught a glimpse of where CSS is going. I like it. A lot.

No images were harmed in the making of this page, it’s all pure CSS effects. Here’s to 2011, when we might even be able to use this stuff.

Comments Closed (27) | posted to Browsers

Dusting off Skeletons

There’s nothing so tragically interesting as somebody else’s train wreck. Cameron Moll asks, “how did you start out?”

Hey, we’ve all got skeletons. Time to pull ‘em out! I present to you, not the first, but one of the first web sites I did for actual money, back in late 1998 (through early 1999): AESP.

It never went live, though I collected a cheque. Comments are open, flood me with your precious eyesores.

Comments Closed (69) | posted to Design

Not Dead.

I’d better leave this on here for the night so I don’t wake up to a deluge of email tomorrow morning. The Zen Garden has been down all day, as has been well reported by now.

A whois comes back saying that the domain csszengarden.com expires today, April 18th 2004. Horribly bad timing, that. I renewed two weeks ago, and while the DNS doesn’t appear to have updated, rest assured my credit card has been debited and it’s still well within my possession.

The actual reason it’s down has nothing to do with the domain: a routine upgrade went wrong, and the Linux kernel on the machine hosting it went up in a puff of smoke. The worker ants are busy bringing the Garden back online. Keep checking back, it’s not going anywhere.

Update: All systems go. We’re back on line. A big huge incredible thanks to Dream Fire Studios for the tireless work in fixing this downtime. You guys rock.

Comments Closed (18) | posted to Zen Garden

Mistaken Identity

Interestingly, it seems that ‘brightcreative.com’ [which is in fact coming soon, despite the empty promise that particular wording entails] is generic enough a name to warrant mistaken identity.

For example: let’s say, hypothetically of course, that my server is configured to forward absolutely anything @ the domain name to my catch-all inbox. Let’s say, also theoretically, that earlier in the week a 2MB email landed in my inbox.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (23) | posted to Ephemeral

More Eric Meyer

Well since the cat seems to be out of the bag, More Eric Meyer on CSS is hot off the press and on its way to a bookstore near you. As a technical reviewer of the book (along with Porter Glendinning), I’ve read it thoroughly a few times, and I can tell you that it’s a real treat.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (29) | posted to CSS

Ape Shall Never Design

Cameron Adams recently posted a link to Adam Greenfield’s old ALA article, The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes. I remember well when it was first published two years ago; it has made a tremendous impact on my work since.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (24) | posted to Design

IE vs. Image Replacement

Sure, I admit it: there’s a glaring IE6 glitch on this site. I’ve known about it for a while, but I’m not going to fix it. Well, there are two glitches actually, and the second is a little more tricky. But let’s talk about the first.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (42) | posted to Browsers

Email Management

An interesting conversation with Jay Allen the other day got me thinking about how I cope with larger amounts of email. Not well, it turns out.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (26) | posted to Technology

Poisson d'avril

Yesterday’s little prank seems to have gone over well. Interestingly, I never thought for a second we’d genuinely confuse anyone, but it sounds like a lot of that went around. Hard to say why it worked so well, I guess you take for granted a site’s chrome once you’ve visited enough. Thanks for being good sports about it, it was plenty of fun.

Doug has followed up with a detailed account of the steps we took, so here are a few notes of my own.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (17) | posted to Ephemeral

Sickening

Update: Yeah, it was all a lark. A gag. A joke, if you will. Poisson d’avril, everyone. Archived for your pleasure: Home Page, Entry page. Thanks for playing along, it was great fun.

If you’re really good, I’ll tell you how we pulled it off tomorrow. (references to Stopdesign below removed so Google doesn’t take this out of context. It’s all a joke, after all.)

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (96) | posted to Ephemeral