Cheesy Quintessence

Despite the fact that I have one of the most dead blogs on the Internet, on Friday night I was hit with a lot of inspiration, and decided to redesign it and this site. I’ve been working on it most of the day since then, and now it’s ready for the world! I’m still working on it, so a few of my pages are currently unavailable or unstyled, but I still think it’s a lot better than what was here before… especially for Internet Explorer sufferers, since I’m using only CSS that it can handle natively. Does this mean I can finally blog for the mainstream?

This new design utilizes a really cute JavaScript I found recently: Nifty Corners Cube. For where it can create a desired effect, this script solves all of the existing problems with making rounded corners on web pages, such as junk markup and tedious, redundant CSS. The only major downside is that it requires JavaScript, but I don’t think that’s a huge issue, because images can fail to load as well, and rounded corners certainly aren’t a requirement. Nifty Corners definitely gets my seal of approval!

Any thoughts and suggestions on the new design would be greatly appreciated!

Today I read an article claiming that MySpace’s design works. The article extensively makes excuses for the simplicity, ugliness and inconsistency of MySpace’s design, justifying it by claiming that it’s effective for the target audience. While I would agree that a design need not be complex or filled with eye candy like so many sites’ designs are, the article’s other points are fairly ridiculous.

Consitency in design could be attained with less complex code if MySpace would make correct use of CSS. Why waste time to look crappy and inconsistent? Because of the way it’s coded, what consistency MySpace does have is extremely time-consuming to maintain (for example, stylistic HTML attributes are everywhere). Even if the target audience doesn’t care, the exhibited cluelessness of MySpace’s web interface coders is costing them time and money (especially in bandwidth costs, considering this is the 7^th most popular English site on the web).

Another point made by the article is equally ridiculous:

MySpace permits users to do almost anything to the look of their profile pages, and the prevailing aesthetic is decidedly “more is more”: more color, more animation, more typefaces, more sound, more of everything makes a better profile page.

Of course, properly styling a MySpace profile is impossible (not that it matters anyway, considering the inherent validity of a MySpace page’s markup). Additionally, since MySpace is stuck back in 1995, using HTML attributes to change the presentation of almost everything, it’s impossible to customize the look of specific elements of a profile. As a result, anything you can do to customize a MySpace profile will look even more hideous than the design of MySpace itself.

I’ve cleaned things up around here; the site name is cheesier, the HTML is greasier, the CSS is tastier, and, amazingly, it all holds together in Internet Exploiter now! Thus, if you refuse to move to a decent web browser, you can finally view this site, although it will probably take the browser several seconds to exercise the necessary script by Dean Edwards before the page will be rendered properly.

Also new is the latest comments list on the blog and my list of college classes under general info. If there’s anything anybody thinks I could do to make the site look a little better, let me know.

You’ve likely stumbled upon the successor of pop-up advertisements: DHTML pop-ups. These advertisements utilize JavaScript to change the CSS positioning of a block element containing an ad. A pop-up blocker will not stop them because they don’t create windows; all of the event takes place in the web page itself. Additionally, the “close” buttons on some of these elements have a secondary function of opening a pop-up window, which will get past many pop-up blockers because the browser will interpret it as a requested window!

Why don’t advertisers seem to understand that people will not tolerate this crap? It’s really unfortunate that JavaScript is going to be abused in this way… because I’m to the point of turning it off almost all of the time. Browsing without JavaScript is much faster due to excessive use of it, as well. Perhaps the advent of such JavaScript abuse will change the approach Google has been taking with its more recent projects, such as Gmail and Google Maps, both of which absolutely require JavaScript.

But since there are a few sites out there that still demand JavaScript, I think it’s time that browsers take an accessible and intuitive approach to JavaScript permissions. My ideas…

1. Incorporate a JavaScript whitelist or blacklist, at user’s choice; much like Firefox’s pop-up, image, and extension installer lists.
2. Add handy buttons to add or remove the currently viewed server from the whitelist or blacklist.
3. Add an option to refuse JavaScript from off-page servers.
4. Add a quick, per page option for JavaScript permissions; much like Opera’s image loading options.
5. Add numerous JavaScript options pertaining to the manipulation of CSS. Extra points if your whitelist/blacklist can individually change each server’s permission to each of these.

I got HTML Utopia on July 30th and have read all 12 chapters already. I must say that the book is not quite what I had expected. Considering that the focus of the book was designing a web site without tables using CSS, I would have expected much more focus on positioning techiques, the most troublesome part of designing a layout exclusively with CSS, than this book offers. Instead, the book barely touched that subject, making it quite a disappointment to me…

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