Congratulations, you’re a Wizard! Very wise and
old, the Istari were sent to Middle Earth to
help and guide its inhabitants. Gandalf and
Radagast are good-natured, but watch out for
Saruman.
Which of Tolkien’s races are you best suited for?
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WHITE
??Which colour of Death is yours??
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Apparently, dealing with absolute positioning and floats has been something that people consider difficult. Or at least irritating.
Not compared to nested tables. Holy crap, did that suck. (Auto-suck?)
The first design, Backyard, is all about absolute positioning versus floating. I’m really not a fan of the absolute, myself. Too much overlap, too much possibility of data loss when a browser is resized or your page is viewed at wacky resolutions. There was one bit that grabbed my curiosity and ran: When you use absolute positioning, the rest of the document completely ignores what you positioned, as if it weren’t there.
Gone. Bamf.
Great for columns, not really that great for anything else. Once again, this is only IMHO.
In the work I tend to do, floats are preferable. Images need to have text wrap around them dynamically, depending on size of the window and size of the graphic. I want to be able to change the graphic without having to re-work an entire CSS class. I want to be able to apply the class broadly, instead of specifically. Also, floating leads to liquid layout.
Which brings us to Entomology. Fixed layout takes your data, gives it a specific size, and lets whitespace or background graphics fill the excess allowed by bigger browser windows. Liquid layout lets your data fill the entire window, no matter how large or small. Fixed layout tends to look a bit more business-professional, but from a utilitarian standpoint, that’s a whole crap load of wasted space. Not to mention the possibility of browser windows that are smaller than your content.
HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAD! AUTO-SUCK!
Like that blink tag. Geh.
There’s also a nice trick in this section about using absolute positioning to center a graphic horizontally. With nested divs, I’m pretty sure you could use this trick in a liquid layout.
White Lily is all about the planning involved in layout. The concept that stuck with me here is consistency in design. Little images for bullet-points, links, expanding trees, etc. should all fit an intuitive and consistent theme. The purpose of these things should be easily discernible on first glance.
And then there’s Pret-a-porter. While I dig the graphics and creativity of the design, please reference my earlier notation about horizontal scrolling. Port-a-potty.
CS(S) Monk takes me back. The grid, which is a method of designing layout on graph paper, reminds me strongly of designing Doom levels on graph paper over a decade ago. I took to this method quite quickly, as the grid shows up easily in my mind’s eye, and things lock into place visually.
On the flip side, the grid is best for absolute layout, instead of liquid. I suppose an initial design could be done with the grid method, and then tweaked to become liquid. I’ll have to think on this one.
Not So Minimal deals with clearing, more floats, and absolute-position overflow. It’s mostly tips and tweaks for found problems with absolute positioning. And that’s it for Chapter 3.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The *Fortean Times* reported on the odd case of Dixie, a British donkey that brays backwards. Instead of the usual hee-haw, she expresses herself with the sound of haw-hee. I nominate her to be an inspirational role model for your own inner donkey in the coming week, Taurus. Encourage that tireless, steady, hard-working part of you to be playfully deviant, fond of reversals, and on the lookout for upside-down and inside-out forms of expression–while still remaining devoted to completing the demanding tasks at hand.
| You Passed 8th Grade Math |
 Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct! |
Good things:
Bad things:
I think I’ll go put away my freshly clean laundry.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Ready for a sweet revolution? At the very moment when the polarities are at the extremity of their opposition, they will mutate into a state of dynamic unity. The struggle between the light and dark will dissolve in the face of a rejuvenating catharsis, becoming more like a collaboration. There’ll be a breathtaking cessation of the conflict between logic and intuition, civilization and nature, and masculine and feminine. The truce will not only be fascinating; it will also spawn a synergistic brainchild that has enormous healing potential. The end of strife has rarely had such great potential for generating high adventure.
http://jjg.net/ia/visvocab/
It could be that I’ve already been working in computers for too long. It could be that after over a decade of working in the field, I’ve slowly absorbed the ideas about information architecture, use, and layout purely on my own. It could be that this document is extremely helpful, and I’m just an ornery old geek.
It seemed to me, though, that the first reading was taking the obvious and re-stating it in over-technical terms. It came across as overblown simplicity and logic in design. I understand the need for nearly-universal and simple logic diagrams for flowcharting, idea mapping, and process design. I just think that this sort of thing already existed, far before web design was a twinkle in somebody’s eye.
Logic gates, AND, OR, XOR, etc, have been available for use since the first processor was mapped out. Hell, Babbage may have used simple logic diagrams like these. To pass off simple logic and conditional diagrams as something designed in response to a need in the office offends me. A small history lesson may be in order.
The second document, on the other hand, was extremely helpful. It had a clear and concise chart that compared and contrasted two different flows of information design, which were centered on the two most popular uses of the World Wide Web.