Babble v1 112

babble-digest Tuesday, January 6 1998 Volume 01 : Number 112

In this issue:
Blimey!!
Who are we trying to please?
Re: Americana or no
Delivery Report
Delivery Report
Delivery Report
Delivery Report
Delivery Report
Delivery Report
Re: image-map background image
Re: Using FrontPage 98 to create a project site
Frame question
TECH: Re: Frame question
Re: Background image map
JPEG's leave pinkish "residue" on pages
TECH: Re: JPEG's leave pinkish "residue" on pages
SEND TO ALL my ADDRESS BOOK

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Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 10:37:58 -0000
From: "Steve Hunt" <steve@tnet.co.uk>
Subject: Blimey!!

Happy new year!!

Just checking back in from my holidays!!!

176 babble messages to read!!! (thats my first day taken up then!!)

Spine...#

design department
- ------------------------------------------------
t i g e r i n t e r n e t
- ------------------------------------------------
Work: http://www.tnet.co.uk
Play: http://www.tnet.co.uk/users/spine
Sideline: http://www.world-cup.co.uk

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Date: Mon, 05 Jan 1998 05:57:01 -0500
From: Dana Adams <dana@studiowerks.com>
Subject: Who are we trying to please?

Two comments in recent discussion threads piqued my interest in exactly
who we are trying to please when developing sites.

1. Americana font - use it or not? -- IMHO, asking the question on a
design forum was kind of silly wasn't it? (no disrespect intended - I
probably would ask the same question and still think it silly). Like
most of the responses I thought "Hey, if it works use it!" -- Who gives
a fig if trendy typographers or designers consider the face cliché or
below standard! (unless design awards figure into the site marketing
strategy). What matters is that the site "works" with the treatment and
that users will not click the back button immediately after arriving.
Should we really care if the site meets the approval of our "peers"?
When we do are we putting our own interests ahead of our clients?

2. Template sites - (this one's close to home - so I'm speaking as an
executive producer not a designer) With an organization of 1000+
registered representatives each with "type A" personalities and several
self regulating "regulatory" bodies (NASD, NAIC, SEC) how do can you
develop personal (image/service) sites without using a template? Again,
why should I care if my designer's peers poo-poo the idea of a template
site. If my rep's prospect/client approaches the site does he/she know
it's based on a template? Does he/she care? I think probably to a large
degree, no...

- --
s t u d i o w e r k s
mailto:dana@studiowerks.com | http://www.studiowerks.com
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Date: Mon, 05 Jan 1998 08:48:47 +0000
From: Rich Portelance <rich@tmsdesign.com>
Subject: Re: Americana or no

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> Eric wrote:My partner and I are in the midst of designing our new company logo
> andthe text treatment that I've come up with involves the Americana font.
> My partner feels Americana is a much maligned font in the graphics
> community and unworthy of consideration. I happen to think it really
> works for this particlular word combo so I'm not so quick to pull the
> trigger. I'd really like to hear if anyone shares his aversion for
> Americana.
>
> (Unfortunately I can't throw out my treatment for you to evaluate. My
> partner is a little paranoid someone might apprehend it).
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Erik

First time lister blsh, blah, blah. I would have to agree with you on the Americana
issue, if the font fit...seems to me your partner is reading a little too deeply
into font usage etiquette. Is there a list of fonts you can and cannot use
someplace that Im missing? Go Americana crazy.

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Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 11:39:01 -0500
From: Jeffrey Zeldman <jeffrey@zeldman.com>
Subject: Re: image-map background image

>Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 23:28:07 -0500 (EST)
>From: "Michael Patrick Fegan II" <feganmic@pilot.msu.edu>
>Subject: background image-map
>
>Hola - Could anyone tell me if you can image-map a background image. If so,
>how the heck do you do it?

yes, sort-of.

you can lay a borderless table over your page, fill the cells with
invisible (transparent) pixel gifs, set the gifs' borders to 0, and link
them.

not strictly an image map, but 't'will serve.

two gotchas:

1. in all probability, you won't be able to put anything else on the
page. text, etc. would get in the way of your invisible pseudo-image-map
structure. kind of limits the usefulness of the whole thing, though it
might work for special effects and occassions.

2. in order for this to work, alignment must be exact, which means you
must remove all browser offsets, which differ by browser and platform. you
can kill offsets in IE3, IE4, and netscape 4 by putting

LEFTMARGIN="0" TOPMARGIN="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0"

(all four of the suckers) in your BODY tag. to work in netscape 3 (and
earlier) you'll need to put the page in a frameset, where the page is the
only visible frame. (in other words, the frameset is 100%, *; 100% is the
page with the background-image-map, * is a meaningless page (can be nothing
more than a background color) which is never displayed, since the first doc
gets 100% of the framespace.

not sure why you'd do any of this, but ideas like this often lead to useful
discoveries, and if you want to do it, it's possible.

as an alternative, you might make a page with a table that is 100% of the
size of the page, containing a single cell -- and then use a genuine
imagemap as the background image for that cell.
BUT 1. the image would squash and stretch depending on the size of the
browser window ... probably not attractive; 2. older browsers don't support
background images in tables; 3. not sure if your ISMAP functions would work
if called from within the TD tag.

fascinating problem, captain. good luck!

jeffrey

______jeffrey zeldman presents__________________________

"Slick and experimental." - Mediadome

_________________________ http://www.zeldman.com _______

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Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 12:20:39 -0500
From: "Kristian Andersen" <kristian@intermark1.acsc.net>
Subject: Re: Using FrontPage 98 to create a project site

You can create a private directory in your web and then grant access to
those pages at the operating system level. You can take a look at this
implementation at this site I created:
http://www.jgraves.com
Go to the staff section and see for yourself. It can get messy however
depending on the number of accounts you want to set up. For multiple sets I
would suggest a CGI script solution.

Kristian Andersen
Principal
Viking Design
http://www.vikingonline.com

>> I am having trouble creating a password protected project site in
>>FrontPage 98. I was wondering if anyone could email me (offlist if
>possible)
>>on how to acheive this. I searched the product's help feature and found
>zero.

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Date: Mon, 05 Jan 1998 12:24:59 -0500
From: Andrew Zimmerman <zimmerma@hear.net>
Subject: Frame question

I don't know if this was answered before or not, but I'll try again.

I have a common frameset: vertical menu on the left - content onthe
right. At the top of the left frame I have a graphic align top and
right. I cannot get the graphic to actually align right unless I turn
off scrolling in the <frameset>. Netscape seems to reserve a scrollbar
even when unncessary if the <frameset> is set to "auto". Is there a way
to overcome this in Netscape 3 or 4 or should I just try to align my
images to the top and left?

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Date: Mon, 05 Jan 1998 17:42:29 -0500
From: Porter Glendinning <pglendinning@cen.com>
Subject: TECH: Re: Frame question

At 12:24 PM 1/5/98 -0500, Andrew Zimmerman wrote:
[snip]
>I have a common frameset: vertical menu on the left - content onthe
>right. At the top of the left frame I have a graphic align top and
>right. I cannot get the graphic to actually align right unless I turn
>off scrolling in the <frameset>. Netscape seems to reserve a scrollbar
>even when unncessary if the <frameset> is set to "auto". Is there a way
>to overcome this in Netscape 3 or 4 or should I just try to align my
>images to the top and left?
[snip]

This is another one of those frame "features" that really pops my cork.
>From what I've seen, you're correct -- Netscape reserves that space in case
it needs to add a scroll bar instead of figuring that out before rendering
the page.

Accepting that as a limitation, one possible, although not highly
satisfactory, workaround would be to set SCROLLING for that frame to "yes."
This would cause the browser to always occupy that space with a scrollbar
even if the page didn't scroll -- it would just be grayed out -- but it
would allow you to right justify your image against something that the user
would visually interpret as part of the browser, not part of your page.

If this is an unacceptable solution, as it may well be, you can try playing
with putting the image in a one-cell table whose width is set to "101%" or
"102%." This will allow you to give the appearance of right aligning with
the edge of the window when there is no vertical scrollbar. But it will
cause your pages to always have a horizontal scrollbar, and when the pages
do scroll vertically part of the image will be obscured by the vertical
scrollbar.

If alignment is crucially important and you don't mind the image being
constantly visible, you might try using three frames like this:

+-----+------------------+
Auto --> |*--- | [IMG]| <-- No Scrolling
|*--- +----------------+-+
|*--- | .... ... .... |^|
|*--- | .. .... .... | |
| | ..... .. .... | | <-- Auto
| | ... ..... .. |v|
+-----+----------------+-+

If you can't get any of these to work I would start trying alternatives to
right aligning the image. And if all of this seems a little annoying,
welcome to the club.

- - Porter

+--------------------------+--------------------------+
| Porter Glendinning | Century Computing, Inc. |
| WWW Developer | 8101 Sandy Spring Rd. |
| | Laurel, MD 20707 |
| http://www.cen.com | T: 301-953-3330 |
| pglendinning@cen.com | F: 301-953-2368 |
+--------------------------+--------------------------+
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------------------------------

Date: Tue, 06 Jan 1998 09:49:16 +1000
From: Caleb Fuller <email@calebfuller.com>
Subject: Re: Background image map

Michael Fegan II asked:
>Could anyone tell me if you can image-map a background image.

Just put a transparent gif over it and put the links in that. You could
do one image map, or use a table to put lots of smaller gifs. Experiment
and decide what works best.

Caleb Fuller
Analog Creations
email@calebfuller.com
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Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 19:06:43 EST
From: TheGilster <TheGilster@aol.com>
Subject: JPEG's leave pinkish "residue" on pages

Dear List,
This could be a newbie question. I created a page with a white
background and when i visit the site in IE 4.0, the jpeg's seem to have a pink
"residue" surrounding the images. Can anyone explain this and how I could fix
this problem for the future.

Sincerely,
Gil Kruger
Zob New Media, Inc.
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Date: Mon, 05 Jan 1998 20:20:12 -0500
From: Porter Glendinning <pglendinning@cen.com>
Subject: TECH: Re: JPEG's leave pinkish "residue" on pages

At 07:06 PM 1/5/98 EST, TheGilster wrote:
>Dear List,
> This could be a newbie question. I created a page with a white
>background and when i visit the site in IE 4.0, the jpeg's seem to have a
pink
>"residue" surrounding the images. Can anyone explain this and how I could
fix
>this problem for the future.
[snip]

Without being able to see the image in question, I would bet that it's just
the normal rippling that can happen in JPEGs when areas of flat color
border an area of another color.

In order to compress the file size of your image the JPEG method employs
some mathematics that *approximate* your original image -- something about
simulating subtle gradations of color with cosine waves... The resulting
JPEG can be much smaller in size than a plain bitmapped image. Depending on
the quality of these compression algorithms used when saving it, your JPEG
version will be more or less distorted from the original -- wavy color
variations start to appear (the technical term being "JPEG boogers").

In photographs (which the JPEG format was developed for) these JPEG boogers
aren't so noticeable; there tend to be many slight variations of color that
the compression algorithms are better able to simulate. However, areas of
flat color, especially those just next to an area of another color, become
JPEG Booger Central. Solid color doesn't lend itsellf well to JPEGs
wave-style compression. That's why the rule for these types of images is to
use GIF compression, which focuses on repeating patterns of pixels rather
than areas of color gradation.

Whew! That's a screenfull...

If you'd like to read a more concise and studied version of what I just
said -- although I guarantee you that you won't see them work "booger" into
any of their explanations -- check out Creating Graphics for the Web's
"Compression Basics" section at this URL:
http://www.widearea.co.uk/designer/compress.html

They have a good explanation of both the GIF and JPEG compression schemes,
as well as examples of each.

Hope this helps. :)
- - Porter

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Date: Tue, 06 Jan 1998 09:52:19 +0100
From: Filippo Spiezia <filippo@ideagrafica.it>
Subject: SEND TO ALL my ADDRESS BOOK

hi all

I hope this question isn’t very stupid but at this day
i can’t send with my mail software (netscape communiucator mail)
a mail contemporary to all the person of my address book in one time....

Is it possible? I can't see the command!!!! and it's urgent...

Thanks for help me...
Filippo

filippo@ideagrafica.it
http://www.ideagrafica.it

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End of babble-digest V1 #112
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