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September 15, 2005
Week 2: Communications Lab
Class materials can be found
here.
Reading: "Blogs of War" (blogging in the military)
The "blogs of war" brought up the point that military on-site blogging cannot be stopped by the military because the technology is so pervasive and has a low barrier for entry. I contend that the military doesn't stop soldiers from blogging because they would rather keep their enemies closer. The fact is, although blogging software is pervasive, software like wordpress and movable type have a recognizable footprint that can be stopped in a generic and templated way. The real shift and potential first amendment revolution would come from an easily deployable combination of movable type and anonymizer.
Reading: Video Game Violence
The interesting thing about the video game rating system is the level of trust between the game makes and the ratings board. A video game has hundreds of hours of play and a rater could not possible play every path in a video game to completion. Subjectively, a video game maker sends the ratings board a thirty minute video of the most objectionable material in the game and the ratings board uses that video to assign a rating to the game. The ratings consortium was actually established by the video game industry, while stores will not sell games that do not have ratings. It's a complete back room deal with no accountability.
Ironically, the big scandal in the industry is not that someone murdered someone else due to grand theft auto but the 'hot coffee' (hidden sex scenes) scandal.
Image Discussion
Generally, photos should be scanned at a very high resolution, 400-600 dpi, but those image sizes are way too high because designing for a screen limits us to 72 dpi.
GIF - losless format
JPG - lossy compression used for web. Use photoshop and 'save for web' but do not use the web safe pallet. that is a relic of slower baud connections.
Color/Image Discussion
Link: Lynda Weinman
There are two hexadecimal values for each of the three colors in the color wheel, RGB. For example, pure red is FF0000. Specifying height and width for an image was also more important when connections were slower. The browser could block off an image and proceed to render the content below the image.
Alt tags are important for accessibility. section 508 contains information for government standard regarding accessibility/usabiility. For example, the ITP website is not accessible because it is written in flash. I cannot load it on my cell phone. The Tisch website is accessible but not usable. The main navigation is on every page. Since a screen reader reads from left to right, the top level navigation is 'read' over and over again on every page. It would be interesting to use a screen reader.
ImageReady
ImageReady comes with photoshop and has lots of neat tools for manipulating images and creating html. For example you can slice an image into multiple table cells and ImageReady will generate the html for you. This is useful for creating a clean server side image map.
CSS
Stylesheets are phasing out tables. They allow for much more explicit control of font and style. The basic CSS tag is specified with a selector, declarations and properties. For example:
selector: H2
declaration: color
property: red
Dreamweaver is useful for designing and maintaining styles.
Posted by mb2811 at September 15, 2005 01:30 AM