Posts from Friday, June 6th, 2003

Zen, Now, and the Hereafter

Published 20 years, 9 months past

There’s a great theme at the Zen Garden: What Lies Beneath.  It’s very non-traditional (hint: you don’t scroll like normal) but very well done, nice and earthy.  There have been several other contributions since I last mentioned the site, all of them quite interesting.  The design process behind one of them has been explained in some detail by its author, Doug Bowman, who knows quite a few things about the power of CSS-based design.

Meanwhile, the Literary Moose has taken advantage of the CSS3 definition of content to show how text can be replaced with an image in a gracefully flexible manner.  If you just see plain text for the headline, follow the link to the screenshot, which was taken in Opera.  If more browsers supported this behavior, we could stop using <span>-based image replacement hacks such as those employed at the Zen Garden and other sites.  I’m not slamming said sites: such hacks are necessary if certain effects are to be achieved in today’s browsers.  It’s still good to have someone pointing out where we might be able to go tomorrow.

As you might have guessed, I’m back from TODCON MX Vegas, which was a real kick on many levels (but not the literal one).  That is one seriously unhinged and fun group of folks, and I’d like to thank Ray West for finally getting me there.  It seems my presentations were all very well received, which is always preferable to the alternatives, especially the ones involving torches and pitchforks.  I hope to get my files online in the next few days, particularly the ones from the “Redesigning” talk.  Pictures from the conference are already appearing over at DWmommy.com, and I’d bet there will be plenty more to come.

I think that of all gifts one person can give another, trust is the rarest and most precious.  In a way that few other gifts do, trust creates a bond that is at once strong and fragile, and that very paradox is part of what gives it so much beauty.  The next time I’m feeling downcast about myself, I need only think of all the people who have trusted me with their thoughts, their feelings, with pieces of their lives.


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