Simplicity and Complexity

[mbarrick]

It's always an exercise in self-discipline to return to the "day job" after a long weekend. That I didn't quite accomplish as much across the long weekend as I had wanted to doesn't help much. I had intended to get a new painting started but woke up Friday morning with the tendonitis in my right arm screaming bloody murder. For the life of me I can't figure out what I did to aggrivate it to that extent - probably the result of drinking a little too much Thursday night while taking pictures at the Arch and then sleeping on it funny.

Regardless, I made some interesting images Thursday night, experimenting with the new flash in a new space.

I'm really enjoying the ability to fill with some indirect light without overpowering the ambient light, not to mention staying away from the red-eye you get trying to take pictures of people in the dark with a direct flash.

Last Sunday at the Red Room was my first attempt at making night-club images with all the new gear and I definitely improved on those efforts. I'm still not as comfortable with the new gear as I was with the old camera, but it is coming.

And speaking of the old camera, my replacement part for the bit I buggered up during the disassambly should be showing up any day now. I just learned that exposed colour negative film is transparent to infra-red and experimented a bit with using a chunk of exposed colour negative as a visible-light filter on my newly IR-capable camera. It worked really well (other than the fact that the flash is now stuck on and until the replacement part arrives to get the appropriate button working again). I'll have to McGyver-up some way to attach this home-made filter to the camera.

So, crippled as I was by the tendonitis flare-up, I put a second mouse on my computer for left-handed use (my usual ergonomic mouse is designed for right-handed use only) and set about to getting the new dynamic design I was playing with some weeks back finished to the point where I could start applying it to http://www.mbarrick.net.

The new design looks very simple and clean, and it is simple for me to maintain, but to get that "simplicity" took some complexity that simply doesn't show. One part of the complexity (visible in the source code) is that the design is wholly dynamic. None of this "Best viewed at X by Y while standing on one foot and holding a coat-hanger covered in tin-foil at 37.5° facing NNW" shite. This is something that has always (since the days of Mosaic 1.0) bugged me about most web designers: a browser is not a piece of paper. As a designer you have to account for the fact that the "surface" you are working with can and will change in size. The other interplay of simplicity and complexity is in the menu. I looked at pre-written code for several drop-down style menus and without fail found the code involved to be needlessly complex. So, as I find is often the case, it was easier and more efficent to write something of my own from scratch. Admittedly what I have is a solution tailored for this design and not a configurable system like those I looked at, but still, mine uses one simple JavaScript function 13 lines long, tested on MSIE 5+ and Gecko 2004+ browsers on Windows and Linux. It degrades gracefully on older browsers, and even works acceptably with text-only and WAP browsers. Based on my own logs, I've got 100% of my audience covered. The menu content is built server-side using Lotus Notes formula language in the database that drives the site.

I've still got to move a bunch of old content over (especially my portfolio) and put together a style for my LJ that more closely matches what I have done with the embedded entries visible via the new website. Obviously without being able to use JavaScript I'll have to make some concessions with the LJ design. Portfolio first, though.

Comments

[tnkgrl.livejournal.com]

Latest Firefox in Windows XP (classic interface) and OS X... Not all menu items always work (depends on the window size)!

With my default setup on both OS's, running 1600x1200 resolution and having the Firefox window maximized the 3 left-most menu items don't work.

Just FYI :)

[littlemissrisk.livejournal.com]

Heh. You were excerising your "drinking muscles" too much, methinks. Don't worry - I have "billard butt" from trying to do too many trick shots this weekend past. Some of them even worked!

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

"Don't work" in what way? Do the drop-downs not appear? Do they disappear when you scroll down off the top element?

[tnkgrl.livejournal.com]

The menus don't appear. The text doesn't even highlight and the cursor doesn't even change (both cues that there's a link there).

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I see the problem. For some reason the hotspot for the links is drifting at high resolution. Move the mouse pointer up about 5 pixels from where you'd expect the hotspot to be and it works. Gah. There isn't even anything remarkable about those links - it's just a nested table sitting inside a right-justified cell.

Once again I feel compelled to reiterate "standards compliant" my ass. This is probably related to a bug that's been around since Netscape 1.0 where for some unfathomable reason pixels are converted to a percentage of screen size for certain operation, the net result being things slop around by whatever 1% of you screen resolution happens to be (in this case 12 pixels vertically).

It shouldn't be to hard to work around.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

All fixed :-)

[tnkgrl.livejournal.com]

Cool... Works great now! I like the simple/clean design :)

Thanks

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

BTW, I can't blame Gecko for the glitch. It was me. I borked up the order of the layers.