Pulchritudinous
15 Oct 2004Pulchritudinous is a very, very cool word. Thankyou for your attention.
I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
Steve Ballmer is either clueless, or deliberately ignorant, regarding the success of non-DRM encumbered music playback devices. John Gruber of Daring Fireball comments.
The [proposed] Public Domain Enhancement Act. If you’re a US citizen/resident, sign it, or at least read about it and form an opinion.
I don’t know what the situation in Australia is with Public Domain stuff, though… Looking into it.
Edge Strain is the “cutting-room floor” of development house, Abstract Edge. Graphically brilliant, purely inaccessible (correct me if this is stated in error!), clean, smooth, polished, high bandwidth.
Some days I wish for that, others, it makes me cry. Worth a look, either way.
Later: I’d like to retract comments about accessibility, if only in part. The website (not concept site — all further comments apply to the website of Abstract Edge, not their “cutting-room floor” display) of Abstract Edge features textual content, hidden by CSS, for non-visual
UA. This isn’t true accessibility, so far as I’m concerned, because there are many, many users who would benefit from accessible design who fall outside the “non-sighted” umbrella.
For example, those on dialup. This website is LOCKED into displaying Flash content only (at least without fiddling with a few things most users wouldn’t know about, or bother to), unless you’re using a web browser which doesn’t support CSS. This presents a problem in terms of bandwidth, if nothing else.
Motor disabilities? You may have the Flash player installed, but that doesn’t mean it’d be your first choice. If you can’t click links because of crazy flying menus inside Flash applications, a text version is certainly preferable. Not only that, even most pure Flash websites don’t include a scaling facility (despite this being an inherent capability of Flash, as a vector-based platform), which obviously means those with visual disabilities (not blindness, just short-sightedness) can’t scale content — something which is possible in most UA these days with pretty much all text content.
Perhaps it doesn’t suit their target, but I don’t know. The “You can’t enter our website unless you have Flash Player 7″ grated at my nerves a little, as I couldn’t see anything about the site/animation which I didn’t know could be achieved without much difficulty in Flash 5, even. That, and the half-baked attempt at “being accessible”, seemingly more out of token effort than actual well-founded motivation… well.
At least it looks pretty.