Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/12/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]2000-12-06-19:08:45 Jim Brick: > For a real treat, go to: > > http://www.ernsthaasstudio.com Idiots. > A masterpiece in web design and photography. I won't quibble over the photos. A masterpiece in web design? Hardly. Let me count the ways. 1) Completely dependent on Flash 4, rather than anything standards-based. Confines viewers to those willing to keep up with the browser-and-plugin-of-the-week race. 2) Doesn't even do what it purports to do -- display stuff if you have Flash 4 -- reliably. The detection script (er, detection Flash movie) was apparently incapable of noticing that I do, indeed, have a v4.0 r12 Flash plugin. I kept getting told to download a Flash plugin, which I HAD, dammit. I had to look inside both the initial HTML page and the subsequent flash movie to find out that the net result of all that over-fancy detection magic should be the loading of http://www.ernsthaasstudio.com/index2.html which indeed consented to play once I asked for it by name. 3) It's an annoying mass of unnecessary animation which gets in the way of actually getting to the content. The little navigation menus have to have their labels and the little lines they perch upon redraw oh-so-preciously before you can see 'em. Then the same for the sub-menus. If the photos and text are what you want, if you're not fascinated and entertained by the wondrous innovation (not!) of a Flash-based website squirming beneath your eyeballs, it's just wasted time. 4) Would that the images (you know, the photos? the things of importance?) were larger. One of the genuinely cool things about Flash is how well it scales to arbitrary-sized displays; but of course photos aren't vectorized like the intrinsic Flash stuff, and so (I fully understand) you can't something for nothing -- more available image detail would require more bandwidth, longer load times. But hey, *that* -- detecting the client's browser resolution and possibly even some notion of available bandwidth, and feeding images accordingly -- would actually be a truly worthy subject for detection magic, if possible. But it does look pretty. Ever so tasteful. Oh, and the standard caveat: I'm *definitely* not speaking for my employer...