[Leica] Re: Haas

[Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>]

Well... I've never loaded any special plug-ins to my Microsoft Internet
Explorer 5.0 and it just displayed all of the neat stuff on the Haas site.
I apologize for being so naive about a site that, to me, really caught my
eye, peaked my interest, and all around Haass' incredible photographs.

Sorry,

Jim


At 08:45 PM 12/6/00 -0500, Jeff Moore wrote:
>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...
>