From: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org (navy-soup-digest) To: navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Subject: navy-soup-digest V4 #75 Reply-To: navy-soup@smoe.org Sender: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk navy-soup-digest Sunday, July 22 2001 Volume 04 : Number 075 In This Digest: ----------------- Re: Website uplift ["Julian C. Dunn" ] Re: Website uplift [Steve I ] Re: Website uplift [Michael Curry ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 14:22:15 -0400 (EDT) From: "Julian C. Dunn" Subject: Re: Website uplift On 20-Jul-2001 W. L. Estes wrote: >> Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 11:56:33 -0400 (EDT) >> That's your perspective and you're entitled to it. But if people were >> surfing the Net only for the content and nothing else, we might as well >> typeset everything in tags, or send everything as Content-Type: >> text/plain. People nowadays treat the Web like it's a magazine or a >> television channel, like any other kind of media, and expect it to look >> good on top of the content. I wouldn't read a newspaper that was typeset >> all in Courier, for example. > > Actually, no. Take a typical math or science text book. They use a > great deal of visual layout and still provide a vast amount of > content. The two can easily work together. But if there is no content, > there is no reason for anything else. E.g., the local newspaper in my > town a few years ago decided that it needed to have more pictures and > fewer words and this move caused some bit of disgust around here. Yes, > it looked better, but the newspaper had diminished its reason for being. I can agree with you somewhat, but I feel that the Web, whether we like it or not, has deviated from its original purpose as a content-only medium, and any attempts by anyone today to say "to hell with the visual niceities, stick with the content" will come up short with the majority of viewers. Whether or not this is a good thing is a different matter, but for those of us designing websites, we can no longer focus strictly on the content and have to make it look nice, too. >> It's up to the browser to support the plugin, then. The generic plugin API >> is very well documented. If Mozilla and Konqueror, both open-source Unix >> browsers, can successfully use the Flash plugin, there's no reason why >> others shouldn't be able to. > > Julian, can you clarify something for me? Is it just the plugin API > you're referring to or the behavior that constitutes "flash" itself > you're talking about? The plugin API itself. The Flash plugin is shipped in the form of a shared library (DLL for you Windows folks) which exports a bunch of function calls. If you're interested I can look into it more for you off-list, because I suspect most Soupers aren't particularly interested in details about C++ on this list. :) > Say, what do you all think about turning this list into a programming > discussion forum? Would Sarah's "new" voice sound ok if she were > singing, for example, something written in C++? I don't think anything can top Adam's comment about C# so I'll leave well enough alone. - - Julian [ Julian C. Dunn - jdunn@aquezada.com * WWW: http://www.aquezada.com/ ] [ FuE exfe94 a+++ Ifte/slc lonca r- ps++ bs+ t++/*t C+++$/C! w+++ p7 LF+++ ] [N++/N! cd350 pr++ g+++ S-/S *x++ Fa+++/Fa$/Fa! m1 b+ fc+++/ E>+ rl-- *d s!] [ "90% of a solution to a problem is a scapegoat" ] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 17:53:50 -0400 From: Steve I Subject: Re: Website uplift Hey folks, I've been following this "website uplift" thread with great interest. Jess is right in that I didn't design the microsite, but I am still involved with the site so I'm very interested in all opinions of the new microsite. So far we've heard mostly negative reactions. Still interested in those, but you couldn't *all* hate it, could you? I'd like to hear from those who like it as well (personally, I think it's great and it really evokes the spirit of Sarah's music, at least for those who can see it!) This whole content vs. design/pictures thing is intriguing to me. My personal view is that a website's purpose is to communicate. To that end, who's to say that text is the be all and end all in reaching that goal? Take a website for an environmental issues group. Sure, a load of text about how we're destroying the environment can help communicate the message, but couldn't the same be said for a picture of a beach covered with oil and dead fish and birds? Or a photo of a skyline dominated by smokestacks belching heavy black clouds into the air? In the case of Sarah's site, it's not just about giving details about an album or listing tour dates, or tracing the path of her career, although those things are undeniably important. It's not even strictly about Sarah's music, although that's obviously hugely important too. It's about communicating what Sarah is all about as an artist (musical and visual). As many of you know, Sarah is also a very talented visual artist, and her art is a big part of the new microsite. Sarah had a lot of input on this microsite from the beginning, and consequently it's more about her and her vision than the old site, which is more reflective of how *I* saw Sarah a few years ago. At 02:22 PM 01-07-21 -0400, someone wrote: > > there is no reason for anything else. E.g., the local newspaper in my > > town a few years ago decided that it needed to have more pictures and > > fewer words and this move caused some bit of disgust around here. Yes, > > it looked better, but the newspaper had diminished its reason for being. I respectfully disagree... again, I think that pictures can communicate an idea just as well or better than words. I've already given an ecology example, but how about another - a newspaper could describe the pattern of events in a war all it wants, but I wouldn't get a better idea of what was going on than if I had a simple graphic with a map and symbols of troop movements and so on. Similarly, I could look at a table full of numbers for hours and not understand it, but I could glance at a bar graph or line graph of those same numbers and understand it right away. Like many people, I am a visual person. Text is not the only way to communicate ideas. Pictures communicate ideas too. So does sound, and music, and animation. And yes, so does design. So why can't pictures, sound, music, animation, and design count as content? To me, saying that content=text on the web is like saying content=lyrics in music. It's not telling the whole story. Anyway, all that aside, nothing is communicated on sarahslean.com if you can't get past the splash page. I didn't even know about AdSubtract's pop-up killing thing, so many thanks to Meth for bringing that problem to my attention. Steve ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 18:38:21 -0400 From: Michael Curry Subject: Re: Website uplift At 05:53 PM 7/21/01 -0400, Steve I wrote: >Hey folks, >I've been following this "website uplift" thread with great interest. >Jess is right in that I didn't design the microsite, but I am still >involved with the site so I'm very interested in all opinions of the >new microsite. So far we've heard mostly negative reactions. Still >interested in those, but you couldn't *all* hate it, could you? I'd >like to hear from those who like it as well (personally, I think it's >great and it really evokes the spirit of Sarah's music, at least for >those who can see it!) If you read back through the comments, you'll see that no one had any problems with the graphic content of the microsite window, they had a problem with the fact that it has to be in a weird little pop-up rather than just in a normal window. What shows up in that window is, imo, quite well done. Just don't see the point of the pop-up. And no one made some all-inclusive statement about graphics being bad or useless, there was just some complaint about sites (and I don't think Sarah's revamped site was the target here) where the desire for pretty pictures overwhelms the need to convey actually information (news, tour dates, sound samples, etc) to as wide an audience as possible. The talk about Sarah's site just led to a wider debate on the topic. Michael ------------------------------ End of navy-soup-digest V4 #75 ******************************