Babble v1 124

babble-digest Sunday, January 11 1998 Volume 01 : Number 124

In this issue:
Web appearance on Macs and PCs
Re: lack of design quality in europe?
Re: I.E. 4 for Mac
end grammar discussion/cookies
Re: Slicing images in PS4
Re: Saving Gif's In PS
Fractal Imaging
16 color images
Re: lack of design quality in europe?
auto update script
Re: strunk & white?
Re: Slicing images in PS4
Re: mac/pc software use
TECH: Re: 16 color images
Re: strunk & white
Re: Fractal Imaging
TECH: Update scripts and other scheduling
Scrolling/non scrolling frames
Attached: Better 256 Palettes for PhotoShop 4

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 17:25:32 +0100
From: "David P. Leader" <d.leader@bio.gla.ac.uk>
Subject: Web appearance on Macs and PCs

Matt Newell made some remarks about the appearance of graphics (presumably
web pages) on the Mac and PC which suggest he doesn't understand certain of
their intrinsic differences. The following is not part of a Mac v. PC
flamewar but a reminder to all you advanced web designers out there that
you have to take these into consideration when designing a site that is to
be viewed cross-platform.

>i see how the mac treats some things, and i like it, but i go to my pc and
>see the sharpness and clarity that photosop and netscpae/ie has and it
>bugs me that mcs are blurry (i have looked at many) and the colors always
>seem washed on on them...

If you find the colours washed out on a Mac it is probably because they are
optimized for the PC. If I optimize for the Mac you would find them too
dark on the PC. One needs to compromise. On the Mac you can set the gamma
to uncorrected on the Monitors/Sound control panel to simulate the PC
darkness. Presumably you could do the converse in software on the PC (?).

>some characters that show as wingdigns on pc.

You need to understand the difference between the Mac and PC character sets
and which characters need to be coded by escape sequences. You can't just
type things in in html! (In all the talk of web software, I haven't seen
that feature mentioned, probably because English-speaking US users seldom
use special characters.) I have cobbled together my own un-expert summary
of what works and what doesn't at:

http://www.biochem.gla.ac.uk/CharSet/Chars1.html
http://www.biochem.gla.ac.uk/CharSet/Chars2.html

(Comments and corrects appreciated. But don't tell me the design stinks -
it's not supposed to be anything other than my own aide memoire.)

Just thought I would mention it.

David Leader

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Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 12:43:04 +0000
From: "Nick S=?ISO-8859-1?B?xm5pb3IgID8=?=" <nssoonfa@mica.edu>
Subject: Re: lack of design quality in europe?

>>And if you go to Europe, where I work, you will
>>seldom see a real good arranged website with a bit of quality.

I tend to see BETTER print overall design overseas, particularly in Europe.
Eurpe tends to have slightly looser censorship laws, therefore letting
designers 'push the edge' a bit more. Macworld Europe edition a thousand
times better designwise than our edition. Web design there tends to be....
not so great as their print design simply because they are stil paying
per-minute for local calls(modem calls to ISP, add ISP charges and phone co.
charges gets expensive) how that effects someone designing on their hard
drive then just uploading it mystifies me however...

My buck-fifty.

Nick Senior
GlasssBee [de]signs
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 12:56:55 +0000
From: "Nick S=?ISO-8859-1?B?xm5pb3IgID8=?=" <nssoonfa@mica.edu>
Subject: Re: I.E. 4 for Mac

>
>IE 4 for Mac is a thing of beauty, many cool features, totally stable,
> great Java performance, it's an all round masterpiece. Of course it does

<nightmarestory>
Odd, I must have downloaded a different MSIE 4,0.... :), mine is constantly
crashing every time I use it actually. The installer thing was nicve, for
some odd reason it had problems installing on my computer, and after much
struggling I finally installed it and it then started freezing my 'puter on
startup. It was hell installing the bugger.
</nightmarestory>
On the flip side, however it is a good looking web browser, Outlook is a
pretty nice email client and it does have some nice customization features
that Netscape cant touch.(the "favorites bar" is nice. To reiterate, the
non-butchering desktop feature is a great! :)

Nick Senior
GlassBee [de]signs
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 17:44:25 +0000
From: Paul Frost <paul@hpromo.demon.co.uk>
Subject: end grammar discussion/cookies

2 topics in one mail?! but how?
1. whatever people think about grammar is fine, but an "advanced web design"
list ain't the place to discuss it, suffice to say when it affects
comprehension. which it don't (btw the colloq. is deliberate)

2. something to do with what we're supposed to be discussing:
i'm currently half way through redesigning my main client's site, and have
decided to bite the bullet and produce different versions for different browsers
(this is kinda necessary given their requirements).

obviously, the next thing to do is produce a front end browser detect, and i'm
aware that this can be done using jscript and cookies. unfortunately, the public
perception of cookies ain't great (i know they're harmless enough, but it's not
me who is gonna be using the site), and jscript only runs on some
machines/browsers.

i wondered what the current preferred solution is (no, i don't want "why don't
you just make pages cross browser, it won't work), whether ppl had implemented
any solutions etc etc. any asp related stuff would also be cool.

"don't know about you but i am un chien andalusia"
Paul Frost Web Development
www.phw.co.uk Priority Healthcare Wearside
paul@hpromo.demon.co.uk Sunderland, UK
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 13:04:19 +0000
From: "Nick S=?ISO-8859-1?B?xm5pb3IgID8=?=" <nssoonfa@mica.edu>
Subject: Re: Slicing images in PS4

>Dear List,
> How does one slice an image into pieces in PhotoShop 4 for faster web
>loading? Are there any guides in the program to slice accurately? I want
to
>learn the process, not some plug-in.

I could be a fool here, someone can tell me if there is an easier way but, I
always just did it "manually" (select an area crop it off and save , select
part of the remainder, crop it off and save, etc) I thought that was the
only way.....is it?

95% Babble list approved Spelling and Grammer kinda correctish :)

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 13:10:23 +0000
From: "Nick S=?ISO-8859-1?B?xm5pb3IgID8=?=" <nssoonfa@mica.edu>
Subject: Re: Saving Gif's In PS

> I am new to Photoshop and I would like to ask what might be a basic
> question. How come I can't save an image

There is a plugin called GIf89a or something included with photoshop. (under
the File-export menu) I've HEARD that P/shop adds all sorts of little
encodings
that only p/shop uses when it saves files therefore Gifs saved under it tend
to be a bit larger than a GIF saved in another format. Personally, if you
have it(if not, get it) open the pshop file in debabelizer and save it as a
GIF there... it'll be smaller. ANOTHER way is to get Photo GIF or Image
vice, both plugins for photoshop,that have better GIF export than the Gif89a
plugin. they are available from boxtop software at:
http://www.boxtopsoft.com
ftp://ftp.boxtopsoft.com/pub

hope it helps!

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 13:05:14 -0500
From: "David R. Israel" <davidi@mail.wizard.net>
Subject: Fractal Imaging

Hi --

have stumbled on, and read with much interest, Iterated Systems'
exposition on "Fractal Imaging" ( http://www.iterated.com/science/ ).

Look forward to exploring this further. Should be interested to know
to what extent this is familiar terrain. Any views? experiences? feedback?

best, d.i.

david raphael israel
washington d c
davidi@wizard.net
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 10:05:43 -0800
From: BobNancy <bobnancy@jps.net>
Subject: 16 color images

Hi all,

I came across the following comment in "Web Publishing Unleashed" p1151:

"Both Netscape and Microsoft Explorer do a much better job displaying most
256 color images than 16 color images, so the visual quality most people
see is quite a bit better at the higher color depth"

Is this true? It would seem to imply that images that have only a few
colors should be saved as 8-bit gifs rather than say 4-bit.

Bob

bob lathe
Bob & Nancy's Services
http://www.bobnancy.com
mailto:bob@bobnancy.com
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 19:37:45 +0100
From: "S. Lutzmann" <SLUTZMANN@asv.de>
Subject: Re: lack of design quality in europe?

> But the fact is that in German-speaking countries a lot of people don´t really know what good web-design is. We have some very good designers and websites in Germany

It seems that the realtionship with the German ego is pretty rocky, especially if they pretend that there is no good design in Germany. This kind of statements are modern, boring and wrong. We have lots of absolutely cool stuff here and we have the clients which understand that we make a good job. I wonder how germans can declare that there own people are to stupid to recognice good design... Don´t be a missunderstood, unappreciated artist, please.

have fun
Sabine Lutzmann

- -----------------------------------------------------------
Sabine Lutzmann Tel: ++49-172-4339430
Axel Springer Verlag Ag FA.: ++49-40-34726192
- - electronic publishing - Fax: ++49-40-34726195

"mailto:slutzmann@asv.de"
http://titanic.abendblatt.de
- -----------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 12:55:16 -0600
From: Nina Sossen <nrsossen@facstaff.wisc.edu>
Subject: auto update script

I'm new to the Babble list, so I apologize if this has been addressed
earlier.
Our web site has some pages that change every day at midnight. What we've
been doing is actually connecting to the server every night and manually
changing the pages.
For example, our home page is entitled index.html. We have the following
week's pages labeled, for example, index0112.html,(January 12th page)
index0113.html,(January 13th page) etc. We go in at midnight and change
the name of the next day's page from, say index0112.html to index.html
This is a pain.
Is anybody out there using some kind of an automatic script to do this sort
of thing?
We're running Netscape Enterprise Server on Windows NT Workstation 4.0 OS.

I know this is more of a computer programming question, than a design
question, but if anyone know of a solution, we'd be grateful.

thanks,
Nina Sossen
Wisconsin Public Television Web Site Producer
nrsossen@facstaff.wisc.edu
http://www.wpt.org

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 14:13:47 -0500
From: John Shelley <js@gdnctr.com>
Subject: Re: strunk & white?

At 06:07 PM 1/10/98 -0800, Jim Bass wrote:
>Whoever said that using capital letters is optional? Do you really save that
>much time being sloppy? The rules of grammar were invented to facilitate
>communication. Just because it is email doesn't confer absolution.

At 08:07 PM 1/10/98 -0800, Jeffrey Zeldman wrote:
newbie questions are okay on an advanced web designer's list.
flame wars are fine.
dozens of bounced mails? no problem.
mime attachments? they're swell.
"which wysiwyg is best?" let's have hundreds more.
replies which include an entire previous digest? give us more and more
of
them.

but lowercase sentences? god forbid.

oh, my people, my people ...

someone help, please: my capital letters have
all disappeared! i'm now lost and can't
communicate! oh woe is me, oh woe is me...

___john shelley________________________

"Give a man a fish
and you feed him for a day.
Teach him to fish
and he never shows up for work."

_____________________www.gdnctr.com____
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 21:05:28 +0100
From: Marc Elmlund <marc@wineasy.se>
Subject: Re: Slicing images in PS4

At 11.42 -0500 98-01-11, TheGilster wrote:

>Dear List,
> How does one slice an image into pieces in PhotoShop 4 for faster web
>loading? Are there any guides in the program to slice accurately? I want to
>learn the process, not some plug-in.

Check out http://www.andyart.com/photoshop/ps_36.htm

Marc Elmlund
xponent media
Stockholm, Sweden
marc@wineasy.se

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 21:01:32 +0100
From: Marc Elmlund <marc@wineasy.se>
Subject: Re: mac/pc software use

At 09.54 +0000 98-01-11, Jason Holland wrote:

>Just get an accurate gamma toggle extension and you can easily flip between
>the 2 settings by the press of a key.

You can get a PC gamma setting from Lynda Weinman's site
http://www.lynda.com that works with the gamma utility that comes with
Photoshop.

Marc Elmlund
xponent media
Stockholm, Sweden
marc@wineasy.se

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 16:14:26 -0500
From: Porter Glendinning <pglendinning@cen.com>
Subject: TECH: Re: 16 color images

At 10:05 AM 1/11/98 -0800, BobNancy wrote:
[snip]
>I came across the following comment in "Web Publishing Unleashed" p1151:
>"Both Netscape and Microsoft Explorer do a much better job displaying most
>256 color images than 16 color images, so the visual quality most people
>see is quite a bit better at the higher color depth"
>
>Is this true? It would seem to imply that images that have only a few
>colors should be saved as 8-bit gifs rather than say 4-bit.
[snip]
>bob lathe

No, the rule on decreasing color-depth still applies. I think what this
quote may be referring to are images that are made using the Windows
standard 256 and 16-color palettes, not the number of colors that an image
uses. The colors in the 256-color palette are closer to the 216
browser-safe colors than those in the 16-color palette.

For example, the 256-color palette color #CE0000 (206,0,0) is much closer
to it's browser-safe cousin, #CC0000 (204,0,0), than the 16-color palette
color 7F0000 (127,0,0) is to its browser-safe cousin, #660000 (102,0,0).
Because the browsers generally dither using browser-safe colors to achieve
the mathematical equivalent of the original color (this option can be
overridden, at least in Netscape), images using the 256-color palette are
dithered less than those using the 16-color one.

However, having said that, it's best to avoid creating images using either
of these two palettes, and to stick to the 216 browser-safe colors when
preparing images that will be saved as GIFs. Then the large areas of color
in your image won't dither on machines set at 256 colors or higher.

- - Porter

- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Porter Glendinning pglendinning@cen.com
WWW Developer http://www.serve.com/apg/

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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 98 13:20:52 -0800
From: Craig Hockenberry <craigh@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: strunk & white

I CAN'T STAND READING E-MAIL THAT ISN'T ALL UPPER CASE. DON'T ANY OF YOU
REMEMBER THE IBM 360?

LATER,

- -CH

P.S. DID YOU KNOW THAT UPPERCASE CHARACTERS WERE CHOSEN NOT FOR
READABILITY, BUT BECAUSE THE DESIGNERS FEARED THAT HAVING "GOD" AND "IBM"
IN LOWERCASE WOULD OFFEND CERTAIN GROUPS OF PEOPLE. GUESS WE'VE GONE FULL
CIRCLE.

>Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 06:07:50 -0500 (EST)
>From: Jeffrey Zeldman <jeffrey@zeldman.com>
>Subject: Re: strunk & white
>
>At 06:07 PM 1/10/98 -0800, Jim Bass wrote:
>>Whoever said that using capital letters is optional? Do you really save that
>>much time being sloppy? The rules of grammar were invented to facilitate
>>communication. Just because it is email doesn't confer absolution.
>
>
>newbie questions are okay on an advanced web designer's list.
>flame wars are fine.
>dozens of bounced mails? no problem.
>mime attachments? they're swell.
>"which wysiwyg is best?" let's have hundreds more.
>replies which include an entire previous digest? give us more and more of
>them.
>
>but lowercase sentences? god forbid.
>
>oh, my people, my people ...

- --

_____________ http://www.iconfactory.com ______________

The Iconfactory -- Quality freeware icons for your Mac

"Your desktop's never had it so good" -- WIRED Magazine
_______________________________________________________

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 98 21:24:40 +0000
From: Joe Gillespie <pixelp@dial.pipex.com>
Subject: Re: Fractal Imaging

>have stumbled on, and read with much interest, Iterated Systems'
>exposition on "Fractal Imaging" ( http://www.iterated.com/science/ ).
>
>Look forward to exploring this further. Should be interested to know
>to what extent this is familiar terrain. Any views? experiences? feedback?

Iterated Systems Fractal Compression has been around for some time. I was
very impressed with the file size and quality however, when I enquired
about actually using it, they wanted an awful lot of money for the
licence and hardware to produce the files - over $15,000 for the
compression card.

This was four or five years ago, I don't know what the situation is now
but it is an asymetrical compression technique that needs a lot of
horsepower to create the files in the first place.

Joe

W e b P a g e D e s i g n f o r D e s i g n e r s
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Visit the new site at http://www.wpdfd.com/ email: joe@wpdfd.com
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Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 16:42:39 -0500
From: Porter Glendinning <pglendinning@cen.com>
Subject: TECH: Update scripts and other scheduling

At 12:55 PM 1/11/98 -0600, Nina Sossen wrote:
[snip]
>Our web site has some pages that change every day at midnight. What we've
>been doing is actually connecting to the server every night and manually
>changing the pages.
>For example, our home page is entitled index.html. We have the following
>week's pages labeled, for example, index0112.html,(January 12th page)
>index0113.html,(January 13th page) etc. We go in at midnight and change
>the name of the next day's page from, say index0112.html to index.html
[snip]
>We're running Netscape Enterprise Server on Windows NT Workstation 4.0 OS.
[snip]

I could write a quick Perl script to do this if no one else out there has
anything that would work. If there is a way to query and parse the current
date from a batch file then it would be trivial to create a batch file that
could be scheduled with the "at" command to run every midnight.

Along a somewhat related front: I use a scheduled batch file to transfer my
Netscape bookmarks file, as well as some HTML-formatted data from my
PalmPilot like my address book, to my Web server every midnight. That way I
can always get to my bookmarks no matter where I am. Extremely easy, and
very cool. I could tune this for public consumption if people are interested.

- - Porter

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 09:47:18 +1000
From: Caleb Fuller <email@calebfuller.com>
Subject: Scrolling/non scrolling frames

Hi all,
Anyone have any suggestions as to how I can change the status of a frame
which initially starts out with scrolling off, and then have scrolling
turn on once a link is clicked?
I know this seems a bit off topic for the list nowdays, but surely
someone out there is still discussing web design ;-)

Caleb Fuller
Analog Creations
email@calebfuller.com
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Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 17:59:41 -0500
From: Richard Bondi <rbondi@virginia.edu>
Subject: Attached: Better 256 Palettes for PhotoShop 4

- --=====================_884577581==_
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Dear Everyone,

If you've ever created a 256/216 browser safe palette in Photoshop using
e.g. David Siegel's or Lynda Weimann's GIF from the Web, you know that the
beautifully organized GIF turns into a chaotically jumbled PS palette.

Attached you will find two palettes that don't have this problem.
"cube_outer.aco" contains the outer faces of the 256 color cube, and
"cube_inner.aco" contains the faces of the inner cubes. I created them
laboriously by hand.

Installation Instructions for PhotoShop 4:
==========================================
(Note: I use a PC, I don't know what if anything to do differently for a Mac.)

1. Place the two attached .ACO files in the /Photoshop/Palettes folder.
2. In Photoshop, select Windows->Show Swatches
3. Click on the small black arrow-head in top right corner of the Swatches
window. A menu will pop up.
4. To replace your current palette with one of the 256 cube palettes,
select Replace Swatches from the pop-up menu.

That's it! If you want to display both cube_outer and cube_inner in your
Swatch window, load the first with Replace Swatches, and the second with
Load Swatches.

Best,
Richard Bondi
http://www.cineville.com
http://faraday.clas.virginia.edu/~rsb5c
(CV is out of date: I'm now an ASP/SQL/VBscrip programmer.)

------------------------------

End of babble-digest V1 #124
****************************

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