Peter Wooley’s Blog

Nearly one year ago, I began taking a class where I heard web design described in this way: it’s way too limited. Upon further investigation, I came too understand this instructor to love the freedom she had in print design and didn’t want the rules and regulations that went along with having to design for the web – the bandwidth constraints, the browser compatibilities, the lack of fonts, etc. In the time since, I’ve had ample time to consider these and realize that it is for those reasons that I love the web.At heart, I am coder. Whenever I can code something I do, whenever I can take a programming class, I love it! I love the idea of changing clear text into something useful – even beautiful. But, I also hav a love for interface design and design in general. I have never and will never claim to be an artist, in the traditional illustrative sense. I will say, however, that I attempt to reduce my artistic limitations by bolstering my coding skills (and bow hunting skills) as well as what I believe to be pleasing interface design skills. And this fits into what I believe the Web is doing.With the introduction of web standards and their slow integration, we web designers are accepting and aiding in the Web’s greatest abilities. We are now using Cascading Style Sheets to style our pages in an attempt to maximize speed for users. We are using hierarchy in our mark-up that allows any system to, at the very least, see what our content is. And we are doing it in a more expressive and meaningful way than ever before.No longer are we using “best view in my browser”, but rather bridging the gap between browsers so we may mimic the Internet’s interoperability and be sure that every individual can view our designs as they should – the way we mocked them up in Photoshop (or Illustrator, you crazy cats). We are taking on the limitations and conquering them.Speaking for myself, I love working with the limitations of the Web as we know it. There’s something warm and fuzzy in knowing that you created a clean, easy-to-navigate, beautiful design that can be delivered to users on dial-up in less than 4 seconds and they could view it in IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari and even IE5/Mac. It’s a really, really good feeling. And I’m not sure I could ever feel that way about print design.

Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth with my love and hatred of Flash. I can attribute it to one of the founding reasons I started in the field of Web Design. With a 30-day free trial that ran out all too fast, I created some of the worst looking timeline-driven pieces of art I have ever seen. But, I was hooked.I began taking a Web Design class at school and got to play with Flash 5 on a Mac. Thinking back, I remember it being a horribly slow and painful process. Once I learned of the beauty of CSS and the glorious XHTML 1.1 standard, I threw flash by the Wayside and began work that led to my current work position and attendance at the Art Institute of Portland.Only recently did I hear about this new Flash. This, beast of a program that is dipping further and further into the world of Raster. I was intrigued. I vaguely remember opening Flash MX and apparently missed Flash MX 2004. But Flash 8… now there was a site for sore eyes. It appeared as though the first time I’d seen Flash. It did everything I could dream of and more. It now handles motion detections from input devices, it tweens blurs and best of all – it’s scripting was totally different from my run-ins with Flash 5.In my classes, I started playing with scripting and enjoying nearly every second of it. My heart, though, was still rooted in standards-based layouts and searchable, well-formed code. Flash just can’t offer it, but it could offer animation! Until, of course, I was treated to AJAX – the Web 2.0 revolution. Finally, browsers wanted to support Javascript and finally, I decided to learn it. Now I’m a javascript animation fanatic. I love coming across anything Flash-esque done in Javascript and I love making it myself.So, I was back to not believing Flash was worth very much. And just today, I was treated by a friend to Flash’s scaling behavior. I had no idea, but you can actually tell Flash what to scale when the stage gets larger and what not to. Well, that did it, I’ve fallen back in love and I think this is a relationship built to last.You may check out my first page scaling test and see what I mean. Hot, right?I guess you can expect to see me running with some more Flash and trying to forget its short-comings. I’ve accepted them, but I don’t want to remember them. After all, there’s no place like Flash.

Through the choking, burning smoke rising slowly from the lowest pits of Hell, you can just make out a faint blue dot, swimming amongst the twisted, glowing flames of Satan’s Lair. You keep your gaze, and as you look longer, you see the soft bevel, the over-used gradient and it hits you – it’s Internet Explorer!All right, even though I don’t truly believe a piece of software can go to Hell, I do wish it could. I just stumbled upon a fix for an age-old IE problem I’ve never been able to conquer. The problem is known to some as the IE clear:both bug. Reason being, when you use clear:both on an element it will sometime (and I stress “sometime” to the furthest extent of the word) make pieces of text in *other* elements disappear. And the best part is that when you get the flicker, the flicker is unpredictable… some times it will get rid of h1s, other times it will just take out chunks of divs (including their background images).I’ve been dealing with and working around this problem for at least two years and I am happy to say I think I know how to deal with it – mostly. In the link I posted above, Alex Mauzon found that you could add position:relative to the container that was being screwed up and it would fix it. I ended up having to just put it on all my divs (thankfully I had no position:absolutes, but they should have taken precedent). Anywho, I beat it. So take that IE! And if I ever see a blue dot floating in the fiery pits of Hell, I’ll be sure to chuckle.Update (05.16.2006): In using this hack, I found that in some cases it created bizarre behavior in Gecko-browsers for some floated elements. So, at least in one case, I used the star html (* html ) hack considering IE was the only problem. And I should reiterate, this hack has been a breath of fresh air on my late-night coding sessions.