Funeral
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
There's always something to bitch about where pitchforkmedia is concerned, like when they gave Eric Kowalski a 3.3 for Whole Numbers Play the Basics. But here it is the end of another year and time to compile another list of years' bests and I have to agree with pitchfork in making The Arcade Fire's album Funeral the number 1 album of the year.
You can never expect everyone to agree, naturally. My brother says that it's "too arty," which is weak from his philosophy major self. But whatever.
I saw Arcade Fire play the night before Thanksgiving here in Milwaukee at Mad Planet, a crappy little place to play. But the show was incredible. When they played track 7, Wake Up, as i've said, it sounded as if the walls themselves were singing. There's that little guitar/drum intro, then all seven of them up on the stage just started singing at full blast. I looked around because at first i thought the entire crowd was singing along... but it was just them. It was intense. If you still haven't heard them, do.
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buzz cut
Monday, December 27, 2004
About a week before Christmas i shaved off my beard, which infuriated my wife, as she'd just bought me a beard trimmer for Christmas. So i figured, why not make some use of it;
i shaved graham's head.
not completely, obviously. That'd be idiotic. i used one of the extensions! Either way it's pretty short now, but it makes him look tough. Which probably means that i'll be manhandling him that much more now.
though i guess it's hard to look overly tough in teddy bear/robot pajamas.
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tables and css
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Ok, so the conclusion that i came to with tableless design, mostly after trying for days to implement the technique/file i uploaded monday, was that it was just not worth the time and the trouble to try to make it all work without tables-- you know, when there are tables that can be used. one common argument is that tables are not meant for layout, they're meant for displaying "tabular data". Like charts! Woo. Some even go so far as to allow for forms to be laid out with tables, you know, being generous. But realistically, table layouts are how the web has evolved. Why try to come up with some scheme to fake table-like layouts with divs. It's pretty much expected that if you have a colored bar down the side of the page with navigation, that bar is most likely going to(should?) extend down the page to the end of the content. Of course this isn't a hard and fast rule, but as most of us know, there are reasons for certain conventions and there are reasons for sticking with those conventions. A fundamental aspect of usability is giving the user what they expect, even if s/he doesn't know to expect it.I'm all for rules being broken and, you know, learning the rules so you can bend them, etc. But eliminating tables altogether, i think, is just making things unnecessarily hard on ourselves.
another major argument for tableless design is the ability to change your layout on the fly. All you have to do is swap css files and yay! new design. But that's what templates are for. I'm not talking about dreamweaver templates. Every site that I do for work is done with a template.jsp, which every individual page calls. The content for each page is saved in its own jsp file and if you want to redesign the whole site, just redesign the template. Even sites that i do at home, where i don't have the luxury of a programming dept, i still use php includes to simulate templates.
what really helped convince me wasn't even necessarily all of the problems that you encounter with css and browser issues. First of all, i don't like using hacks. If it doesn't work, figure out a better way to do it. Hacks are pretty aptly named. The thing is, css applies really well to tables. Background colors, fonts, padding, borders, all that shit. It's all applicable, with the exception of margins on table cells. But whatever. You can have divs inside of table cells. You can still do all of your little dhtml trickery. But with a base table, you have a solid structure to start from. The beauty in combining tables and css really lies in the elimination of spacer gifs and nested tables. No more 1px wide table cells. No more empty cells to add space around content. Yay padding!
the problem, i think, was that in being a designer trying to move forward and keep current, as you start to learn about tableless design you pick up on this notion that tables are for weaklings and if you can't do tableless, you really just suck and won't be able to stay current in web development. Whatever. Don't believe it. The way i see it, tables are just as applicable as ever, and really they're one of our most reliable layout tools.
ironically, j-ink.com is tableless.
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3 column layout
Monday, December 20, 2004
this is an html file that i wrote a while back when i was still convinced by the css community that tableless design was the way to go. when you resize the browser window and the center content grows vertically, the height of the outer columns is adjusted with javascript. It all seems to work rather well, and in a simple layout it may really work just fine. but i found that the more complicated the layout became inside of this base structure, the harder it was to keep everything consistent and right.i'll follow up pretty soon with my thoughts on tables vs. tableless, but for now feel free to use this layout for your wack tableless layouts.
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Sept Song
Friday, December 17, 2004
Ok, i've been meaning to get my first post up for a while, so this is going to be it. I've been working on this new song since september. I don't title my songs till they're done (though i have to admit that i do have a name that i'm contemplating at this point), so the working title is always basically whatever is the latest rendition of the song-- currently song 6. Do me the favor of not streaming the song from my site, please. Do the right click, "save target as" thing. ("Save link as" for you savvy firefox users.)Anyway, it's a work-in-progress so don't be too critical yet. I'm still trying to generate ideas for more detailed work, and have yet to even do a lead part. Besides that there's a lot of production work to do on it as well. Either way, feel free to post comments or email me with whatever feedback you may have. I'll follow up with further posts as the song progresses.
I also had plans to upload some of my css "experiment" files, which i will probably do here sometime in the very near future. We'll see how that goes. My intentions and my actions are rarely in-sync with each other.
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