Scott's transparent GIFs

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Did you notice that Scott uses transparent GIFs to space out his comics?

Poll ended at Sun Sep 28, 2003 10:14 pm

Yes.
1
11%
Nope.
6
67%
How gauche; I only use transparent TIFFs to preserve the color.
2
22%
 
Total votes: 9

DecafSilicon
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Scott's transparent GIFs

Post by DecafSilicon »

This is in response to Greg Stephens' discussion of Scott's HTML on the Walrus thread.

Half-joke, half-curious, not at all to be mean to those who noticed or did not.
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Greg Stephens
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Post by Greg Stephens »

Actually, Wikkit pointed out the transparent .gifs. I just elaborated (at length) on webcomics authors in general not being website gurus.
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Post by DecafSilicon »

Yes, sorry, my citation was sloppy. If you visit my blog, you'll see that's a habit of mine.

Okay, that was just a poor jab at luring you to my blog.
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Post by buzzard »

Well, then there's the myth of CSS.

CSS is a standard because some people said it was a standard. It's a huge spec and enormously complicates implementing browsers (because, among other things it introduces an entirely new language, one that interacts in very weird ways with HTML), setting back any hope of researchers ever coming up with significant browser-side experience improvements since it's no longer possible to throw together a new browser. (E.g. instead of actually getting systems for managing a gazillion bookmarks well, we get... tabbed browsing (a tiny improvement over 'open in new window') and mouse gestures (an inferior solution to 'pie menus').)

Moreover, CSS is basically non-backwards compatible, at least as deployed by most people, at least for people who care about their site's appearance (which they presumably do since they chose to use CSS). By not using CSS, you keep a website looking identical on new browsers <i>and</i>
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Post by buzzard »

grr, the HTML close-tag bug strikes again.

You keep sites looking identical between new browsers and old browsers, and by so doing you reveal your webguru-ness, not the lack thereof.
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Post by DecafSilicon »

Yeah, I'd get Opera if it had a better bookmark system. My extra mouse buttons beat out mouse gestures, and while tabs are nice on DeadAIM, I need to alt-tab and tile my IE windows.
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Post by Greg Stephens »

Some responses, but it's late and I'm not really mentally fit to be doing so, so forgive me if I make no sense.

Using the Firebird browser, I find tab-based browsing to be vastly superior to MSIE's opening new windows all over the place (and the built-in pop-up killer is a must-have). I don't ever want to go back to multiple-window browsing and don't consider it a trivial feature.

I've tried current versions of radial-menus and mouse-gestures and at the moment the mouse-gestures are easier for me to use, but mostly due to poor implementation of radial-menus for browsers thus far. I'll keep trying them, though, since they work great in some of the games I play.

The web is just out of its infancy. Backwards compability at this point isn't going to help anybody. Since the latest versions of all the major browsers are readily available for free, there's really no reason for anybody not to upgrade. Support for old browsers isn't a strong argument for not actively encouraging newer markup technologies for modern browsers. CSS, when done well, can degrade gracefully in older browsers, keeping the site accessible while not forcing anybody to upgrade.

CSS and HTML do play nice together, but the weirdness we see and the complications you get are due to different browsers (mostly MSIE for Windows) getting CSS wrong and inventing their own tags for both HTML and CSS. The biggest hurdle for anyone learning CSS is learning how different browsers interpret the code.

People who use CSS aren't doing so primarily because they want their sites to look good- They do so because it makes so many things easier in the long run. It cleans the HTML code, makes updating the site's look easier, lessens the bandwidth cost, and provides many new features that can't be done with HTML and would have had to be coded in something like Javascript in the past.

As far as bookmarks go, I do agree that there's never been a good system for keeping them, but so long as Google exists, I've no real need to keep an updated list of bookmarks for anything other than the most routine tasks (daily comics and blogs I read, for example).

Lastly- All standards are standards because somebody said they were standards. Dismissing CSS as a standard using that argument is sort of silly.

OK, I'm done for the moment. Not meaning to flame, but felt I had to respond.
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