Babble v1 125

babble-digest Monday, January 12 1998 Volume 01 : Number 125

In this issue:
Re: TECH: Re: 16 color images
Grammar, Text Enclosures and Platform Wars ...
Re: TECH: Update scripts and other scheduling
Re: TECH: Update scripts and other scheduling
Wrong list?
Wrong list?
TECH/DESIGN: Re: Scrolling/non scrolling frames
Re: TECH: Update scripts and other scheduling
Re: I.E. 4 for Mac
Re: Grammar, Text Enclosures and Platform Wars ...
How big until you break it up
tips & work arounds
Re: Fractal Imaging
I.E. 4 for Mac: another pro vote

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

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 98 17:08:36 -0500
From: ryan carver <rcarver@graceland.edu>
Subject: Re: TECH: Re: 16 color images

>>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.

I saw something like this once. I had these big images that, when saved
as 5 bit gifs (they looked great in photoshop) and viewed in 8bit color
on a pc running netscape 2.0 they would have some severe color remapping
problems. they looked fine on practically any other platform-
pc/8bit/netscape3, pc/16bit/netscape2, any mac...

when I saved them as 8bit gifs they would look just fine everywhere
except the file size doubled..:(

I tried various things like dithering to 5bit, then back to rgb then
saving as 8bit but nothing worked. unfortunately I had to make 'em 8bit
and suffer the huge file sizes since netscape 2 was the big browser at
the time

(sorry for the lack of capitals letters...)

-ryan

<< ryan k. carver
<< rcarver@graceland.edu
<< www.graceland.edu/~rcarver

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

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 98 15:30:06 -0000
From: Kevin Travers <kwt@highfive.com>
Subject: Grammar, Text Enclosures and Platform Wars ...

Hello Babblers!

Excuse my lack of presence yesterday, I was actually without an internet
connection for a full 24 hours! (it's okay, I'm better now)

so here's the scoop ....

as far as grammar goes, mine is usually horrible when I am zipping out
emails, as I am sure you can all tell. I don't know about the rest of the
listers, but I tend to read about 500 emails a day and I write a couple
hundred easily. I don't usually concern myself much with exacting grammar
or spelling for that matter. the point of the list is to share ideas ...

when I sit down with a fellow creative and we sketch ideas on paper (you
know, that stuff they make from trees?) we don't concern ourselves with
these details because it is a skecth. think of the list this way, a web
designer's sketch pad. As long as it's readable, it's passable.

also, when people are quoting other people's posts, please be careful not
to quote the entire document. this can be set in your email client's
preferences. It causes some long digests otherwise and make things
difficult to read.

lastly, lets keep the Platform Wars to a level of relevancy. there were
some good topics being tossed around such as gamma settings, character
sets, etc. These are very important things to know as a web designer. I
have my own platform preference, but I'm not even going to tell what it
is so that I can stay diplomatic. Nobody argues about what sort of
sketching paper to use or between hard or soft pencil leads, or oil paint
and acryllic, they just accept that different people use different tools
and everyone continues to create happily!

Peace and Web-Goodness to All,

Kevin Travers
H I G H F I V E
kevin@highfive.com
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------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 10:31:46 +1100
From: scottw@nemas.com.au
Subject: Re: 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.

Alternately, if you're doing your index page manually, you might just
like to use
the "at" command without bothering about a perl script.

eg,

at 23:59 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su "copy c:\newindex.html c:\index.html"

what that does is at 23:59 every day it copies newindex.html to
index.html, at least then
nobody needs to be up at midnight to do the copy.

Scott

- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott Walters, IT Director, Nemas Pty Ltd http://www.nemas.com.au
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 16:47:30 -0700
From: Nathan Perry <perry@theshop.com>
Subject: Re: TECH: Update scripts and other scheduling

>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.

I, for one, am very interested in a PERL script that can update with the
"at" command. I'm currently running a script for updating sites that parses
a "private" and "public" directories, gives you a choice of commands for
pages who's time-stamp don't match, and let's you submit the
changes...updating files from the "private" site to the "public" site...I'd
love to be able to set a time for certain files to change over...we do a
lot of timely sites, with info often needing to change at midnight.

np
The Shop Interactive
http://theshop.com

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

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 18:46:13 -0600
From: Pat Flanagan <pfpd@pfpd.com>
Subject: Wrong list?

Am I receiving the wrong list? It seems like I've been getting the "let's
flame each other about the way their spelling/grammar/capitalization/etc."
list. Jeez, please get off that thread. If you can read and understand what
someone's said, that should be good enough. It's one thing to sweat the
details when you're producing a website, but give it a rest when we're
having a conversation. Do you correct every little problem when your
friends are speaking with you face-to-face? I don't think so. It's
conversational speaking, and this will be a much friendlier list if we look
upon it as a conversation.

Oh, and to everyone who disagrees with the above and thinks that we must
adhere to Strunk & White in all postings, ok, I don't mean to infringe on
your rights to post your opinions, this is an open forum, blah blah blah,
yada yada yada, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.

In the words of a famous 20th century philosopher...

CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG??? :D
____________________
PFPD -- newmedia marketing consulting
a limited liability company
PO Box 281, Granger, IN 46530-0281 v:616.663.2250
<mailto:pfpd@pfpd.com> -- <http://www.pfpd.com>
competitive business advantages through creative technology
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 19:01:04 -0500
From: Porter Glendinning <pglendinning@cen.com>
Subject: TECH/DESIGN: Re: Scrolling/non scrolling frames

At 09:47 AM 1/12/98 +1000, Caleb Fuller wrote:
>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've posted a demo of one way to do this at this URL:
http://www.serve.com/apg/babble/frameScroll/

It's a two-level frameset like this:

+-------------------------+ <-- Outer frameset top frame (no scroll)
|+-----------------------+|
|| || <-- Inner single-frame frameset
|+-----------------------+|
+-------------------------+
| |
| LINK | <-- Outer frameset bottom frame
| |
+-------------------------+

The page starts with the contents of the top frame being a single-frame
frameset with scrolling set to "no." The link in the bottom frame targets
the top frame and loads a different single-frame with scrolling set to
"auto." (That is, the scrolling is done in the inner frameset, not the
outer one.) Both single-frames point to the same content document, so
clicking the link seems to only add the scrollbar to the user.

> I know this seems a bit off topic for the list nowdays, but surely
>someone out there is still discussing web design ;-)
[snip]

Web design? Damn! I thought we was selling pictures of kittens...

You can have a flaming logo, or a spinning logo.
- - Porter

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

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

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 19:03:25 -0500
From: Porter Glendinning <pglendinning@cen.com>
Subject: Re: TECH: Update scripts and other scheduling

At 10:31 AM 1/12/98 +1100, scottw@nemas.com.au wrote:
>Alternately, if you're doing your index page manually, you might just
>like to use the "at" command without bothering about a perl script.
>eg,
>at 23:59 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su "copy c:\newindex.html c:\index.html"
[snip]

I think Nina's situation is a little more complicated. It seems like they
do the index files a week in advance, and embed the date each applies to in
the file name, which is why I suggested some sort of script to parse out
the current date and grab the appropriate index file.

Scott's idea would work nicely if, at some point each day, someone was
willing to manually make a copy of the next day's index and name it
"newindex.html" which is certainly an improvement over having to go in
every midnight just for a file copy.

- - Porter

>> At 12:55 PM 1/11/98 -0600, Nina Sossen wrote:
{snip]
>> >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]
>> 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.

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

Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 08:26:38 +0800
From: Chris McLay <chris@eycon.com.au>
Subject: Re: I.E. 4 for Mac

I installed IE 4.0 and it hasn't worked yet. It killed IE 3.0 and the beta
of IE 4.0 as well. Not pretty...

>RE: MSIE 4.0 for Mac, released last Tuesday
>
>I downloaded it immediately upon release last week
><www.microsoft.com/ie/mac/>, all 17 Mb of the full package, bells and
>whistles, etc. But first I downloaded their recommended installer
>program (300k) which receives your main download and then holds all the
>components in compressed form, ready to install on other machines over a
>local network, etc. Very nice!
>
>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
>NOT melt into your Mac desktop and perform all the interface
>interference as on Windows. Have I been assimilated? No, but it is worth
>the time to get it, play with it, and maybe even designate it as your
>default browser.

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

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 20:33:11 -0500
From: Dana Adams <dana@studiowerks.com>
Subject: Re: Grammar, Text Enclosures and Platform Wars ...

Kevin Travers wrote:
~snip~
> Nobody argues about what sort of
> sketching paper to use or between hard or soft pencil leads, or oil
> paint
> and acryllic, they just accept that different people use different
> tools
> and everyone continues to create happily!

Here! Here! (unless of course you insist on Weber-Costello pastels in
which case you'd have to be SHOT FOR HERESY!) - sorry couldn't resist...

- --
s t u d i o w e r k s
mailto:dana@studiowerks.com | http://www.studiowerks.com
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 21:29:28 EST
From: Erik 240 <Erik240@aol.com>
Subject: How big until you break it up

Okay, listees,

Here's another design, non-technical question. How big do you make your
pages before you break up information? I read somewhere (don't ask me to
recall) that only 20% of surfers bother to scroll down a page, and you
should count on most people not seeing what doesn't show up in the first
screen. I find this difficult to believe.
I'm working on a project with lots of text 'content'. You know...
what the company does, broken into subsections, and then each of those
broken into subsections. All in once piece, it works out to about hitting
'page down' two or three times on a 640 x 480 screen. Does anyone think
that is too much? This is how I would present it in a brochure, but on
here, I'm wondering if extra pages might be in order.

it goes something like this;

I. Overview with ideas A., B., and C.

A. major idea

1. sub idea
2. sub idea

B. major idea

1. sub idea

etc....

My though was if I break it up, "A., B., and C." would become seperate
pages. If in your assembled experience you think that people do in fact
scroll a reasonable amount, I think I'll keep it as is. Oh, and there are
alread 3 sections like the one above.

- -- Erik

- ---------------------------------------------------------
The odds of winning the lottery are so astronomical
that buying a ticket does not measurably increase
your chances of winning.

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

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 16:57:34 -1000
From: Ed Robinson <edrob@maui.net>
Subject: tips & work arounds

Aloha From Maui,

A couple of things...

I've listened to a lot of dialog about HTML editors and the program I am
VERY happy with has never been mentioned. It's WebberActive. The current
version is 4th generation compatible with ie4 built-in to handle DHTML,
Channels, CSS, ActiveX, etc. File management is easy, even with a site that
has hundreds of pages. Although it has frames and tables wizards, these are
a bit basic and almost always need cleanup hand coding. It also has a great
verification feature that easily changes between HTML versions, (including
Netscape and ie. tags). On the down side, it does not have a feature to map
image-map coordinates, and it is only available on the Win95 and NT
platforms. Enough! You can check it out at "http://www.webbase.com/webbera/".

Second issue - Tips and work arounds
I would like to see more ideas and techniques explored to help us deal with
the common snafus keeping us from duplicating our creative visions into
output on a monitor screen. I'll throw out a couple of offerings and hope
more will show up that can help us all.

BLEEDING IMAGES - I just spent hours designing a JPEG image that (appears)
to bleed into a color-graduated background. It actually was not too hard to
create. I added the web background colors to a sub-layer in photoshop, and
feathered the main image to bleed through. The problem was in positioning
the image over the correct part of the background so it lined up in both
Netscape and ie. browsers. It seems that there is about a 10 pixel
difference in the top position of an image between the browsers. The best I
could do was take an average, and smudge the background colors to blend
better. Any suggestions?

RANDOM IMAGE - I have run across many Javascript examples that will select
random images each time a page is loaded. My need was to work with just
four images so I was able to distill the code into the following example.
Number each image: "image1.jpg", "image2.jpg", etc. and place the following
code on your page, changing the "3" in the example to your number of
images-1 (this code is for 4 images, I believe it is good for up to 9 images).

That's it folks. Thanks for listening.

Bleed Example: "http://www.mauiscuba.com"
Random Image Example: "http://www.mauiscuba.com/erd1.htm" and reload to see
different images.

Ed Robinson

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

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 23:46:11 -0500
From: "David R. Israel" <davidi@mail.wizard.net>
Subject: Re: Fractal Imaging

Hi --

I'd written,

>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?

and Joe Gillespie replied,

> 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.

Thanks for the backgrounder. The situation now -- like many things!
- -- seems to have advanced a few notches. Unless I'm misunderstanding
something (possible), looks like that $15,000 gizmo is now offered
gratis -- as per Iterated Systems's website:

Fractal Imager is the freeware Windows
95/NT application that creates
Fractal Image Format (FIF) files.
Why are Fractal Images Better?
They interact. These images just
don't sit on the page. They zoom,
flip, stretch and scale at your
Web page readers' command using
Fractal Viewer. And because
they're fractal, zooming and
stretching reveals more detail,
not more pixels.

vide: http://www.iterated.com/nettech/fractalimager/index.htm

Am just in the initial exploring stages w/ this -- have downloaded
said Imager. Again, if others have (or will) explore(d) this, I'd be
quite interested to hear responses (&/or see examples of what you've
done with it).

best,
d.i.

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

Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 01:04:12 -0400
From: "James Morris" <jamorris@pond.com>
Subject: I.E. 4 for Mac: another pro vote

> THIS MESSAGE IS IN MIME FORMAT. Since your mail reader does not understand
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.

- --MS_Mac_OE_2967411853_785952_MIME_Part
Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

I've been using IE 4.0 over the weekend and I'm impressed. I had moved from
Navigator 3.1 to Communicator and had then switched back to 3.1. IE 4 has
entirely won me over. Outlook Express is doing the same to my old
satisfaction with Eudora.

No problems to speak of on a Power Mac 7600, 48 Mb of RAM, OS 8.

I'm sold.

Jim Morris

- --MS_Mac_OE_2967411853_785952_MIME_Part
Content-type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>I.E. 4 for Mac: another pro vote</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR=3D"#FFFFFF">
I've been using IE 4.0 over the weekend and I'm impressed. I had moved from=
Navigator 3.1 to Communicator and had then switched <I>back</I> to 3.1. IE=
4 has entirely won me over. Outlook Express is doing the same to my old sat=
isfaction with Eudora.<BR>
<BR>
No problems to speak of on a Power Mac 7600, 48 Mb of RAM, OS 8.<BR>
<BR>
I'm sold.<BR>
<BR>
Jim Morris<BR>
<BR>
</BODY>
</HTML>

- --MS_Mac_OE_2967411853_785952_MIME_Part--

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

End of babble-digest V1 #125
****************************

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