theMediaman.com

Late last night (around 2:00 AM) I made some changes to the site. The most important would have to be the main page, which has been changed to use an adapted version of my Geek Manifesto I wrote a few years back. Creating text links has been shown to be one of the most effective methods of navigation for several years now (Note to self: include link to that book I read a few years ago).

Additionally, I seem to have a real soft-spot in my heart for “retro-coding“. All this XML crap is getting out of hand. Even the 5K Challenge competition is rewarding overly complex toys using plugins like Flash, rather than rewarding compatibility.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a Flash Geek, and love doing these cool animations exclusively through code, but there are times when I long for the days of 1995 when all links were  blue  or  purple,  Times New Roman was the default font, and all your text and images were on #CCCCCC  because Netscape 1.0 didn’t support background colours.

That’s probably why I kept the new Dark City HEPC page so simple… well, that and the fact that it was already 1:50 AM and I wanted to get SOMETHING up.

Currently, theMediaman.com is a collection of mini-sites… some of which are only one page long. *sigh* I’m going to deconstruct the site and rebuild it with some sort of universal nav system. If I do that, then I’d be better than the Ryerson Image Arts site, where they teach New Media, but don’t bother demonstrating basic usability on their own site. (Just try to find the link back to the Image Arts homepage from the New Media mini-site… *hint* there isn’t one)

At least we can stop hating frames. The message seems to have gotten across that they were a good idea in principle, but a disaster in execution. For the most part, the only place where you still see them is 100% frames that mask the URL.

Finally, I’ve said it many times before, but I don’t think I’ve ever written it here.

The Blink Tag Rule

"Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should" - Comes from the excessive use of <BLINK> in early HTML sites. Some pages had lime-green, blinking paragraphs on purple backgrounds. Besides being difficult to read and just plain ugly, the Blink Tag Rule still applies today to things like web site splash pages (usually minute-long Flash animations with Trance music)