Moved

Future blog content will be posted here at WordPress.com.

This blog will be left up for my web design professor's convenience.

Project 2 - Multiple Scripts

Status:
PHP Mail Form
PHP Secret Society Admission Form
Javascript Pop-up window - click on the thumbnail image
Javascript Drop Down Links List - check the drop down list on the right side
Javascript Change Background - refresh the page several times
Counter

Script Count: 5/6

Week 07 - In-Class Exercise

Status:
Form ( Write | Validate | Upload | Link )

If there be comments after the process, I'll get around to it.

4-26-2008: Completed. I could make it fancier...

Week 04 - In Class Exercise

Status:
Poem (Get | CSS | Validate | Upload)
Scribbles about it

Will update later.

4-1-2008:
The background image for the poem might actually be too large, both in terms of viewing size and in terms of byte size. However, because I am only loading the background image and a bunch of text, I think the byte size is forgivable. The transparency looks good (or at least in my humble opinion).

As to the appearance, it's deliberately noise-ified and crosshatched in Photoshop to give it a fairly blurry image. The image is that of a dove, with another one towards the tip of its left wing; dove = peace, so the whole intent is to fit the image with the poem. My feeling is that the poet cannot find a clear image of peace, hence the fuzziness of the dove.

I want to keep everything fairly clean, quiet, and somber, so the darker background with gray-ish text seems to mood-out well. The only text, other than the poem, is the update and the Index page link.

I used the overflow attribute for the poem div container because then it would be just as easy to swap any text out for another one, without changing the container limits or the look of the page. And I used it to conveniently hide the W3C verification, because while the verification is very nice and all that, I did not want to ruin my background...

One thing I'm fairly unsure about is the scrollbar. Overflow is nice, but the scrollbar-look kind of cramps my style, because changing it would be a bit of a NO in validation. Practically no browsers support it except IE. I myself use Firefox. So it's a necessary evil?

Apparently the [target=""] attribute does not exist in XHTML 1.1 Strict. I myself prefer opening new tabs/windows to pressing the back button, but the standards say NO to that too. I suppose every user out there knows that you can depress the mouse wheel to open a new window. I suppose every user out there knows that you can hold onto the Ctrl (not sure about Macs) and click to open a new window.

Unless the browser window is shrunk to epically small proportions, the CSS Poem page will view fine. The image in the background is fixed to the top right. Large or small, it will stay clean of the poem, which has its own background to guard it if the window is too small. The CSS uses as little precise positioning as possible (i.e. the poem container is actually that far down because I abused the padding in the overall container) so that any resizing would mean the elements arrange themselves accordingly, rather than nagging the browser with horizontal scrollbars.

EDIT: I should probably credit the picture of the dove as coming from the ending animation of the Sunrise production Mobile Suit Gundam 00.

Week 03 - In Class Exercise

Status:
Form Mail page (Modify | Validate | Upload)
Critique on Zen Garden designs

The CSS Zen Garden is full of 'blog' css designs. Here are just three of many:



In order from left to right: Dazzling Beauty, Elegance in Simplicity, and Lily Pond. It's kind of mildly amusing that these sites have RSS feeds. (Floating the text around irritates me, since there's such a small space left to the right. Clicking the thumbnail will lead to screenshot, clicking on links in this paragraph will lead to the design itself.)

The CSS Zen Garden is impossibly populated with graphic-heavy site designs. It's also vaguely annoying that some of the designs are so graphic-dependent, such as Dark Rose and Mozart, the latter which takes a while to load even on a RIT connection. Then again, one of the statements on the page is that the purpose of Zen Garden is to make graphic artists take CSS seriously. Still, most obviously in the 'Lily Pond' site design above, the art is very pretty, but not very practical. The hugeness of some headers (take a look at Organica Creativa here) clearly emphasize look over ergonomics. Many of the sites have small text and/or badly organized text, and even worse than the narrow, huge-header design of the 'Dazzling Beauty' mentioned above is this Manhattan Edition one, in which the header covers a healthy three-quarters of my screen with absolutely nothing.

Most of the sites are organized on a right-aligned sidebar (as is fashionable of the present date) with the main material on the left. Most navigation is located on the sidebar—but I am faintly surprised at why no one attempted an across-the-top navigation, or even just a horizontal navigation. And then there are ones like Tiny Blue which has a nice coloring scheme and polished look—but WHY in the WORLD would a person organize their links in a vertical list on the bottom like that? Doesn't the designer realize people want to move around?

...I just found one that irked me even more: Shaolin Yokobue. A navigation bar is not going to cramp your style, graphic artists! Don't drop it in the middle of nowhere down in the guts of your page!

On the bright side, in the same collection I found a nice one: Simple.

But design is probably a matter of taste and purpose. Graphic artists most likely intend to show off their art, hence the abundance of images and glorious headers. Enough nitpicking; I'm off to work.

Group: Akiko Okazaki

Week 02 - In Class Exercise

Status:
indexH.html (Write | Validate | Upload)
Picture and Name
Placeholder links: midterm, final project
Link to weblog
Two minor scripts working

Starting now.

0903: I give up on using lists on Blogspot for now. All the spacing is driving me nuts. It also befuddles me how my posting time could be so off the mark even though I set it to the right time.

1433: Javascript doesn't seem to be running right.

1523: OOPS, apparently it's "JavaScript". Is there a real difference? Honestly?

1903: Actually did the reading this morning.

2033: Why, oh why did I choose XHTML Strict? It's some kind of murderous doctype that doesn't like javascript and doesn't read some of the old tags. The form that worked in the class-written code refuses to work under XHTML Strict.

3-19-2008: Switched to HTML Strict. Validated, doing last bits before uploading as index.

0716: Got grief again. One of the scripts decided to stop working after I refreshed.

0720: Four minute fix. Just a mismatch of file names.

1313: Last fix, the thumbnail now opens into a non-resizable window.

Week 01 - In Class Exercise

Status:
Creation of blog
HTML htmlRecipe.html (Write | Validate | Upload)
XHTML xhtmlRecipe.html (Write | Validate | Upload)

First attempt to run through W3C Validator produced nice results in the form of "no doctype found", "no character encoding", and "inability to determine parse mode" errors.

How much more 'doctype' does it get than this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

When I pasted the code directly into the markup validation, it's all green. For some reason the validator refused to read the doctype for my uploaded HTML and XHTML files. Will run a second check tomorrow in class.

Edit: 3-12-2008
Validator also accepts the URL pages as valid, when I passed the validator the internet address.