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, only several months after the fact, it came to my attention that Google’s homepage has, in the advent of Google accounts, been completely revamped with a “personalized home,” which turns the seach page into a portal. The personalized homepage is packed with totally spiffy DHTML (just like everything else Google makes these days) that lets you drag modules around. Additionally, Google lets you choose the modules you want to see, such as Gmail, weather, news from all over, et cetera, and even create new modules based upon any RSS you like. Plus, the Homepage API allows people like me to make completely new modules; neato!

As much as I dislike inaccessible HTML, which Google loves to produce, I was pretty impressed as how well this thing works; when I opened the left panel to customize the page, the page smoothly moved aside, and smoothly moved back when I closed it. When I dropped a module I was dragging, it smoothly dropped into place–it’s almost as pretty as OS X in action. Kudos to Google’s programmers–they must have spent a lot of times beating their heads on the wall to get JavaScript to work that well.

Now I might actually view Google’s homepage from time to time. Though I know you Firefox converts haven’t had integrated search since 2001, it’s been that long since I had any reason at all to view Google’s homepage.

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.