Today I got back to it, and I discovered that I had inadvertently copied over all of the Manakin default design’s IE fixes into my new theme. Oh, well, don’t need those, I said, and got rid of them.

And all the display problems on the front page but one magically resolved themselves in IE7.

I feel ever so much better now. Still not looking forward to IE6, but at least I don’t feel quite so much a duffer.

(Though honestly, it could have been worse. I’m scared of what I’ll see in IE6, and as for IE5…)

I tried it with the Morris background to CavLec, and what I got back was so gorgeous as to make me ashamed of what’s here.

Strikes me as something that would work with presentation palettes, too. If I weren’t nearly done with the San Antonio presentation, I’d feed it a few bus photos and see what I got back.

Via Blogula Rasa.

People who understand books and book production understand that individual aspects of typography are overloaded. Overloaded in the programming sense, I mean—depending on context, a given typographical embellishment may have a different meaning. Overloaded, polysemous, ambiguous—whatever word floats your boat.

Take the humble italic font. It demonstrates emphasis. It sets off the titles of books and other extended-length works of art. It sets foreign terms apart from surrounding text. It sets biological genus-species names apart from surrounding text. It delineates ship names (but not, curiously, aircraft names).

It can also be used just because somebody thought italics was a good idea at the time. Colonial-era American typesetters were absolutely notorious for this. If you can extract rhyme or reason from their type choices, you’re a braver woman than I.

Italics, in other words, are a cue. They don’t unambiguously tell the reader the reason for their existence; the reader picks from a mental list of what she’s known italics to signify in past reading, and happily goes on from there.

The neat thing about markup is that it permits various uses of italics to be disambiguated behind the scenes, if desirable. If I’m writing a biology textbook, it’s probably not a bad idea to disambiguate genus-species names from other uses of italics—that makes it possible to create a handy-dandy index of organisms named in the book.

Understand, though, that this disambiguation doesn’t just happen. Somebody’s got to actually do it. Trust me, that somebody is not going to be anybody in standard book production. Italics is italics, end of story. (You might get a clueful copyeditor. I wouldn’t count on it, though—and the clueful copyeditor’s work is wiped off the slate when the book hits print anyway.)

This brings us to HTML, where back in the day, <i> was <i>, and that’s all she wrote. But this is bad! cried the semantic generation of HTML designers. <i> doesn’t mean anything! We have to have tags that mean things!

Which is a complete misunderstanding of the problem. The problem is not that <i> is meaningless. The problem is that it means too many things. The proper solution to this problem, given HTML’s problem domain, would have been to add tags for the commoner uses of italics on the Web and perhaps to insist that <i> be embellished with a class attribute for less-common uses that HTML cannot be expected to anticipate. (I don’t think many practicing biologists sit on W3C working groups, so a separate tag for genus-species names was probably never in the cards.)

What happened instead? <i> was deprecated—people were told not to use it!—in favor of <em>, which means “emphasis.” So let’s step back. Web folks used to tag things ambiguously. This is sometimes necessary (perhaps I don’t know why something is italic!), sometimes not great, but can always be lived with; we’ve lived with it in print for centuries. Now, with the blanket replacement of <i> by <em>, Web folks are demonstrably tagging many things incorrectly, because not every use of italics is for emphasis! This is an improvement? I think not.

I spent much of the weekend wincing at (and either fixing or actually performing) tag abuse of <em>, <strong>, and <q>. And checking my work email every hour or so to make sure DSpace hadn’t run out of memory again. No wonder I’m grouchy.

Sometimes, though? It pays not to fiddle with stuff. I spent most of my last workday fiddling with Open Journal Systems’ markup and CSS. I came in today, ruthlessly copied the out-of-the-box defaults over my work, and am starting over. Why? Because I want to work with (okay, okay, rip off and change) other people’s journal designs, and if I fiddle with the markup and the base CSS, I can’t. Fiddling’s more trouble than it’s worth in this case.

I’m fiddling. A little. Journals without a logo now get MPOW’s logo as a default, and I’ve messed with the sidebar some because I don’t agree with how it’s organized. But most of it I’m just leaving alone, and when I get the urge to fiddle with it, I’m just gonna slap my hand good and hard to stop myself.

I used to think that the stupid mechanical overhead involved in fiddling with DSpace designs (upload, ant update, copy .wars, kill Tomcat, restart Tomcat; have I mentioned lately I hate Java?) was a bug. I’m starting to think that for inveterate fiddlers, it’s actually a feature.

Looking at the site this morning, I saw why. It’s not that the content is bad; the content seems excellent. What’s bad? The total lack of information architecture.

The organization is bad. The navigation is bad. The search is bad (this site is crying out for fielded limit searching). The visual design is bad. The labelling is beyond abysmal. I would never send anyone here to find a resource; it’d be like asking them to find a specific snowflake in an avalanche. Honestly, I didn’t think professional sites with information architecture this bad still existed.

Hints of better site structure peek out from the piled-high badness avalanche; the “virtual bookshelves” aren’t a bad notion at all. But the whole is just bad, bad, bad, so bad I can’t even start taking it apart because I’m not sure what to rant about first.

Moral of the story: Spend some grant money on an information architect (or a librarian! or a librarian information architect!) in addition to your JSP coders, won’t you? Your users will bless you for it, and your competitors will have one less way to cut you out of the picture.

I mean, yeah, I could do the whole journal-submission thing, but, you know, ugh. It’s an article of limited temporal interest, and I frankly don’t have the patience to go through publishing hoops when I’m not forced to it. (Yet another reason Dorothea should stay the hell out of academia.)

So maybe I’ll just post it. I need to tweak the CSS over at TAG anyhow; some things got disarranged somehow during the host move. (I ought to rewrite a bunch of TAG’s sales copy, actually—but talk about things I don’t have patience for…)

Well. Um. Okay. So not a web designer.

But I like some of the sites I see that use a photo affixed to the viewport as background, so I went cruising for suitable photos. I should learn not to do this. I could get lost for years in all the cool photos they’ve got.

Finally I stopped myself. What I need, I said, are pictures of and from the buildings. That only makes sense. One click back to the home page, one click to “About Us,” and boom, there’s the link I want, to pictures of the very impressive WHS building. (Hear me, Jim? The navigation’s grand.)

Oh, but then I find a link to pure unadulterated inspiration. What a rush. Seventeen different flavors of design “bingo!” I purely love mosaics, I purely love printer’s marks—and the colors on these ought to be fantastic as grounding for a web page.

Knowing me, I won’t be able to make it work. Still. I love a good moment of inspiration.

I did a slick little trick for Info Arch client’s site involving turning a thick border into an ersatz navigation bar via relative-positioning the list of links. After much futzing, finally got it working a treat. (Except in Firebird on Win98. Still don’t know what the heck was up with that.)

The problem was that the bar was so thick it had become the dominant visual element on the page, quite overshadowing the (very slick—I can say this because I didn’t design it) logo and the nice swooshy sidebar.

This, one of my groupmates pointed out to me gently, was not good.

Well, okay, I can slim the bar a bit… maybe cut the font size… wait a minute. This is silly. Start over. Start OVER.

Five seconds later, I’d dumped the border and the relative positioning and redone the bar with thin top and bottom borders and the same unobtrusive background color as the navigation sidebar. Much, much better-looking and more reliable, though oozing much less cleverness.

Hey. Maybe the gray instead of the green for the borders there, since the page is so green-heavy… I’ll see. Either way, less cleverness meant a better-looking page.

Eventually I shall be clever again, I’m sure. Fear me…