About this site
Q&A
Why?
Primarily to show my pictures to the world and get a good back-end to put up some reviews and articles I think haven't been written yet.
What was wrong with the old site?
What was right? It was a horrid mix of CSS and tables, designed for Netscape 4 in 2000 with compatibility for lots of old browsers. It was small in physical[sic] size, and the layout made it limited. It was not a good showcase for my photos, my skills, nor did it scale well for extending with other content. At the time, it was made with one single intent: to show some pictures using some DHTML techniques. It was pretty good at that, I think, and it looked good at the time.
Can I see it?
Sure. Old site (2000-2004), old site's photo page, older site (1997-2000?). Even older sites are no longer punishable.
This site does not validate!
All pages should validate, if you find one that doesn't do it, tell me about it and congratulations, you have won a pixel-sized gif. You can get it here.
Do you still use black pixel gifs? That's disturbing.
No. Also, you are easily disturbed.
Why isn't this site XHTML 1.0 Strict/1.1/2.0/ThisDotThat instead of 1.0 Transitional?
Without getting into religious arguments, I felt the Strict declaration might limit my design abilities at the time of deciding. I am not dogmatic about doctypes; it could as well has been HTML 4.01 Transitional, but why not go with something a little more modern.
Where did you steal the javascripts?
I wrote them myself. Main attractions are the mapping script (easy), the universal scroller script (pretty hard, it's Netscape 4-compatible), and the fading-of-images-with-smart-precaching-and-loading-indicator gallery script (insanely hard).
Can I steal them?
I do want some credit for my work. Also, they are undocumented and can be very hard to implement (this is especially true for the scroller). Contact me and we'll sort something out.
Clever trick with the "anti-aliasing" of the fonts up there, but you could have used PNG.
But I do! In everything but IE5 and 6. Sure, IE can do transparent PNG with a filter function (DirectX filter hack), but then you can't do hierarchical transparency (which I use on the gallery page), but you knew that.
Well, you shouldn't care about broken browsers like IE.
I care about lots of broken browsers. The site is tested and works as expected (within the browser's limits) in Mozilla, IE5+, Konqueror, Opera 8+, and Safari. It is somewhat compatible with IE4 and Opera 7. I originally planned to make the site usable in Netscape 4, like most of my sites. Reluctantly, I had to drop it, not because I don't think it could be done (spare some eyecandy, of course) but because of lack of time and interest. It was easier to make a simple text page for old browsers instead. Still, I might do it some day. That should tell you something.
Like what, that you are nuts?
Quite possibly, son.
Final words
May the Box Model be with you.
About me