A few months ago, in a Dutch video podcast I create with my colleague Peet Sneekes, I said that I think the new website of the Rijksmuseum is probably the best website ever. They truly understand that sharing all the works in their collection on high resolution on the web is just an excellent idea. Very refreshing in this day and age where rights holders only seem to care about owning and protecting their stuff. This attitude towards content is liberating. But the site is not just conceptually nice, it’s also nice to look at and to work with. I was lucky enough to attend a presentation about how Q42, the company that built the site, worked with these enormous images and still kept things preforming. Extremely nerdy and extremely clever stuff. So I also complimented Q42 in this video, and I said that they are the best nerd company in the Netherlands. Which is still true. Some people think it’s weird to say nice things about your competitors. I don’t.
Me neither. Go on…
My grandparents were born in the middle ages. My grandmother was the daughter of an opium trader in Asia Minor and my grandfather was the son of a greek orthodox priest in a tiny village in Chalkidiki — now a walhalla for tourists, back then a malaria invested region. To give you an idea of that time: my grandma was sent to an orphanage so she could go to school, which was considered to be a much better situation than the refugee camp they were in after they were forced to leave their home. After his mother died a few weeks after giving birth to my grandpa, the village appointed a young girl to raise him. These, and many other stories I was told as a kid, sound medieval to me. But they happened less than a hundred years ago.
Fascinating. Go on…
Today I gave a one hour lecture at the Mediacollege in Amsterdam for a group of design and development students, their teachers and some invited professionals. I talked about new defaults in web design (the presentation is in Dutch), the idea that the old habits we have when designing for the web are not as useful anymore. The talk usually consists of five sections. One about the old assumptions, and four about new defaults: activate instead of hover, small screens instead of desktops, content instead of cruft, and command line instead of, well, nothing. I chose to leave out the command line part and replace it with a live coding demo of creating two semantically correct monsters that shoot lasers out of their eyes. I was told that kids have a short attention span, so this sounded like a more attractive way to end the lecture.
Still here, go on!
Today I asked on Twitter if anybody knows the reason why t.co exists. I got some answers. It seems that t.co exists to
What? Tell me!
When I was young I used to read books from my parents’ library. In the margin of these books I’d often find scribbles, written with pencil, by my father. They’d either mark a grammatical error in the text, or they’d complement the underlined text with a remark. This could be a shout of joy, a disagreement or a title of a source where more information about the subject could be found. My parents have a library of thousands and thousands of books. Not all of these books will have highlights in them, but many of them will. That’s an incredible amount of knowledge, packed into the margins of books. It’s also an incredible amount of knowledge that’s inaccessible to the world.
What a waste…
Yesterday Peter-Paul Koch published a post in which he suggested that this years Mobilism conference might very well be the last one. Ticket sales are so low, the organisers are in risk of losing money. The conference will be held, and it will be awesome. The line-up looks absolutely fantastic. You’d expect a conference like this to sell out quickly. But apparently it’s not. I’ve been wondering why sales are down, so I asked on Twitter and on App.net.
For real? Go on…
I like the hsla() colour notation. I like it a lot. It’s easy. First you pick a hue (a colour), then you decide how light or dark it should be, and how saturated the colour must be. And the a stands for alpha channel, which means transparency. I use the alpha channel to create lighter versions of the same colour, or to blend the color with the layer behind it.
Yes, I know…
A while ago I wrote this post about aggressive browser spitting, in which I blame ourselves for the fact that we still have to support ancient browsers. In that post I propose an aggressive approach to browser support: if your browser doesn’t understand the current web standards it’s the browser’s fault, not mine. The browser vendor should fix it, not me. This, of course, is very hard to sell to clients. But you can definitely use it in your personal projects.
Interesting!
A while ago I was having a very interesting discussion with the incredible Ron Kersic about the web. We always have discussions about the web. We don’t really talk about other things. But every time I mention the layers of the web – html, css and javascript, or, the way I like to call them recently: content, typography, layout and paint — he tells me I forget a layer. And that’s HTTP.
He’s right, right?
Earlier today I wrote about the right position of the previous and next links in blog posts. I wrote that placing these links before the article seems silly to me. Albert de Klein asked me why I think that’s silly. Here’s why.
Let me know!
Today I asked on Twitter where the links that link to the next and the previous article should be placed . They are often found on blogs. Should they be placed below the article but before the comments? Should they be placed below the comments but before the comment form? Or should they be placed below the form and be considered as a part of the extended footer, with all the navigation in it?
Hmm, don’t know
This is a translation of a Dutch column that was originally published in edition #55 of the Dutch, paper version of Web Designer Magazine. The way we see a painting depends on quite a few factors. What kind of paint did the artist use, and how did she prepare her canvas? Maybe she used cardboard instead of canvas. Apart from these technical variables there are many other things that influence the observation. People will experience the painting differently if we exhibit it on a fluorescent yellow wall, instead of a black wall. It will look different under a daylight lamp than under an old fashioned light bulb. The age of the painting, and the quality of the eyes of the spectator are of influence too. Many artists explore these factors. During the Renaissance period you had the trompe-l’oeil painters. Lighting and the exact point of view are an integral part of these paintings – Holbein’s skull is probably the best known example.
Sounds exciting!
This column was published in edition #55 of the Dutch, paper version of Web Designer Magazine. It’s in Dutch. Hoe een schilderij er uitziet is van nogal wat factoren afhankelijk. Wat voor verf heeft de kunstenaar gebruikt, hoe heeft zij het doek behandeld? Is het misschien op karton geschilderd? Naast deze technische variabelen zijn er natuurlijk ook nog andere zaken die de observatie beïnvloeden. Als het schilderij uiteindelijk op een fosforescerend gele muur hangt, dan zal het anders ervaren worden dan als het op een zwarte muur hangt. Onder een daglicht-lamp ziet het er anders uit dan bij een ouderwetse 25 watt gloeilamp. De ouderdom van het schilderij, en de kwaliteit van de ogen van de observator zijn verder ook nog van grote invloed. Veel kunstenaars houden zich bewust bezig met deze factoren. In de renaissance had je bijvoorbeeld de trompe-l’oeil schilders. Omgevingslicht en de exacte plek waarvandaan het schilderij bekeken wordt zijn van groot belang bij deze werken – De schedel van Holbein is hier wellicht het bekendste voorbeeld van.
Klinkt tof!
In this article about the transfer of somebody from Adobe to Apple there was an interesting remark: Adobe had the chance to set the standard for the web with their own technology and failed. Twice. First they had Postscript, a scripting language for working with text and visuals (if I understand correctly). And they had Flash, a language for visuals, mainly. If, back then when they invented these technologies, they made them an open standard, they would have replaced the current web stack, writes the author. I find this a fascinating thought. It could be true for Postscript, I know nothing about this language, but it’s definitely not true for Flash.
Really?