xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
2nd August 2000

Philosophical Toy World

Watch out for lots of freakily-functioning pop-up windows. “The ideas expressed here have no wish to be well balanced, or even sane. They are a call to reinvest moving images with the marvelous, not through other worldly flights of imagery but through seeing the very production of the moving image in a new light. They are a cry for a multiplicity of ‘cinemas,’ past, present and future.”

posted in Art | Permalink | Comments Off

2nd August 2000

The CSS Anarchist’s Cookbook

“I was getting … thoughts. Ideas. Bad ideas. And once it started, I couldn’t stop it. Oh, I tried. I kept telling myself that CSS should never be used for evil. That in the wrong hands, it could wreak havoc upon the face of the Web as we know it. Then I thought, what the heck…”

posted in CSS | Permalink | Comments Off

2nd August 2000

New navigation and usability ideas

“There is a lot being done to solve common navigation / usability problems. I had a look around the web, here are a few of the more interesting ideas I’ve found.” Touches on searching, personalization and navigation.

posted in Web design | Permalink | Comments Off

2nd August 2000

Effective E-Commerce Design

“Let’s face it, the average online customer can be compared to William Hurt, floating in an isolation tank in some University basement, only without all of the electrodes and pre-historic peyote. So what’s an online entrepreneur to do? If your business is to meet the challenge of selling in a narrow-band, sensory-deprived medium, you must become information intensive. Information intensity involves shifting the focus away from tangible resources and on to information.”

posted in Web design | Permalink | Comments Off

2nd August 2000

W3C Issues Scalable Vector Graphics as a Candidate Recommendation

“Web designers have requirements for graphics formats which display well on a range of different devices, screen sizes, and printer resolutions. They need rich graphical capabilities, good internationalization, responsive animation and interactive behavior in a way that takes advantage of the growing XML infrastructure used in e-commerce, publishing, and business to business communication. ‘Designers are reaching larger audiences with an increasing variety of Web-enabled devices. They need graphics which can be restyled for different purposes,’ explained Chris Lilley, W3C Graphics Activity Lead. ‘But most of all, they need to be able to handle their graphics the same way as their text and business data, which nowadays are in XML. SVG is specifically designed to let them do that.’”

posted in Web graphics | Permalink | Comments Off