Magic Torch

The project is approaching some kind of conclusion. 85% seems like a decent number. For it. Certainly not for the theoretical site that is still sitting amongst the pages of the various bits of project documentation. That has been replaced with something crunchier, trickier and yet more nutritious. 85% sounds decent and reassuring.

Things are still a bit rough round the edges, but also coming together. It starts feeling like a site, despite the placeholder content and the same image on 147 of the pages. The cracks are starting to close up. At least the ones I’m deciding to notice.

Unfortunately 85% means what’s left is all that stuff that I’ve forgotten about or overlooked or ignored. The unknown bits and pieces that’ll only start making noises once the site gets properly used by actual admins and users.

Bloody 15%.

Oh well.

I find the fact that the web is barely more than a dozen years old mind-bogglingly exciting. So much to figure out, try out, fail and succeed at. An extremely addictive mix of abstract concepting and carving logic and method directly out of plain-text. At least where I live in the process. It’s great. You get a real sense of putting the tracks down in front of you as you are barreling along.

At least when everyone involved gets it.

When they don’t, the newness and comparative strangeness of the medium (at least when compared to anything else, ever) doesn’t give you much of a foundation from which to mount a forceful and authoritative argument about how things need to work. Particularly when counter-arguments are being mounted from things like printed paper. Everyone groks paper, or at least they’ll have a good go at kidding themselves they do. It’s safe, barring the occasional cut. It doesn’t do much at all, except lie there and be looked at. Stupid, but comprehensible because of it. And it isn’t the only one. Film and video is possible more stupid.

The web, by comparison, isn’t stupid. It isn’t stupid in about a thousand different directions at once. And that makes it very hard to define. Maybe even impossible to define in terms that’ll line it up nicely with the old media.

I can kind of see why the way the world operates being taken over by this thing that no-one seems to fully understand, and which in 5-10 years is probably going to be unrecognisable, can be scary. And why the people hawking it might be intimidating and make you push things back to places you understand.

I can kind of see that. I can be sympathetic. Honest.

Most days.

Not today, though.

Today was full of people literally waving paper with comfortable and stupid things written on it. Things like “consistent brand colour” and “look at this, then look at this, now stop”.

But today is done. Next?

I spent the last couple of days of last week working on a new website, where we are taking a fully progressively enhanced approach to the user interface. It really did feel good to be working this way. Not having to worry about things like non-CSS drop shadows or corners freed up my head to more carefully consider other choices. Like laying out quite a bit of a busy header using absolute positioning. Not something I’d done before. But starting with markup that is just the way you want it makes you more inventive about keeping it that way.

The other thing I noticed is that the details still remained and demanded attention. I’m not sure I was expecting this. Buttons, clean and simple though they were, still needed to be teased into the correct vertical alignment. CSS still needed to anticipate a change in text-size that would start shifting elements out of their original positions. It was still as tricky as ever. IE6 was still a pain, although not, it turned out, as much as Firefox 2, which has quickly become a persona non grata around here, due to its lack of display:inline-block. Who’d have thought?

Anyway. The process was initially frustrating because I thought I should be making faster progress than I was, but it ended up being kind of a relief. It’s good to know that thought, consideration and creativity are still as necessary as ever. Just used more in the right places.