There and Back Again

I have been working on some web design lately. mostly i have been getting back into it, and realizing how frustrating it can be. Normal software design and engineering has its own problems (I am referring to on-screen presentation here), but they are generally limited to the screen resolution and color bit-depth that the user might be running your software with, as well as system font size and color/style, etc. But the actual layout of your design is controlled by the language you are writing with, and you can be guaranteed that what you are working with is what the end user has (for all intents and purposes).

Web Design currently follows none of these rules, and I blame that on every single software company out there that has written a web browser (Internet Explorer mainly, but also Netscape, Opera, Safari, and even Mozilla FireFox at times). There is no guarantee that anything you design will be rendered the same on these different browsers. There are wonderful standards developed for web design, but the problem is that none of the browsers fully support them, or do so in different ways. I came across an interesting rant on the subject, which i thought came at it from a fresh perspective. I am sick of being taunted by a nice clean and easy to use specification for web design, when anything you write using that specification doesn’t work with our existing browsers!

And don’t get me started on flash. Flash can make for some great websites, and to be honest, it does have some good uses. But i do not like the fact that the web is becoming flash this and flash that. Flash probably got its popularity due to two things:

• lack of control over the aesthetics of web design with standard html styling
• the corporate desire to control media and not allow users to save content

The aesthetics argument is a good one, unfortunately there is no other good way to do it really. But what I hate is the bloat that Flash introduces. you need to install it, and it is Slow! I was reminded of this yesterday when i tried to watch episodes of the office online from NBC.com – It simply slowed my computer to a crawl. and this was for low resolution video that i could have played on my old pc 8 years ago! That is why I hate flash.

Thats enough of that. I upgraded WordPress (this blogging software) just now, and was worried that i had forgotten to save some of my customizations, namely the border image around the images to the right. Thank god for browser caching, i was able to pull the image off of my hard drive and upload it back onto my server. phew.

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