Scratchpad
(css, data visualization, design, style switching — )
1 Jul. 2008
Smashing mag just wrapped up a contest with a nice article on style switching. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately as an interesting solution to dealing with sites that contain a massive amount of data. In particular, it seems to me that the problem with such sites is twofold - the most obvious is that you must cram a lot of info into a small space, but the second is that the user must also be especially engaged to wrap their head around such quantities, regardless of the badassness of the design. So I've been thinking about the possibility of style switching as a solution to this.
In the Smashing mag contest, most of the switchers changed the background of the site they were placed on. But I'm thinking, what about completely changing the layout of the site altogether? In this way, users could choose not just a color scheme that they find pleasing, but an actual structure that is logical and intuitive. Since each user will find something slightly different to be intuitive, the possibilities are endless. Even more so if you allow users to upload their own skin (a bit like the good ol' CSS Zen Garden, but done so that the user's choice of stylesheet sticks with them throughout the entire site) or choose from an entire library of uploaded skins. Skins could even be shared across similar types of site, so, for example, if there was a consortium of libraries involved, they could coordinate their markup and share the skin library so that researchers could get data laid out in the same way from site to site.
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(css, design, gallery — )
3 Apr. 2008
Apparently, CSS can actually make me weep with joy.
I'm working from home today and waiting for an eternal virus scan to end before logging into the company VPN (yes, I'm a nerd and actually do this step....deal with it), so I decided to kill 0.5 seconds by looking at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Cherry Blossom map. The map isn't perfect - namely, I hate that the little info bubbles stay in place even when you move away from a particular tree, preventing you from activating other trees that are underneath the bubble. Even so, I really like it and am impressed by it every time I obsessively reload the page to see whether it's been updated yet or not. It's simple, beautiful, easy to use. So, suddenly overwhelmed with curiosity about how they get the map like that, I looked at their source code and realized they do the entire layout with nothing but CSS. There's a little javascript for the popup tool-tip, but the actual map itself is entirely CSS. Holy crap. That is some loving, painstaking work, and proof that you don't need the latest code fad to accomplish a beautiful interface!
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(css, php — )
12 Jul. 2007
I've been thinking for ages (well, the last 3 years anyway) that it would be cool to try to use PHP in a CSS document to do a variety of things, namely:
- Display certain things based on browser detection
- Randomly change certain elements (eg - a background image or a font size) each time the stylesheet is reloaded
But, of course, I always just thought about it and never actually tried it, because (stupidly) I figured it would not actually work. What was I thinking?! Now someone else went off and did it and they get all the credit. Sigh.
On the bright side, I will maintain that the random item changing (as opposed to browser detection) was totally my idea and still is. Now if I can just find a reason to implement it somewhere......
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