Our little crew is off to Austin TX for another joyous installment of SXSW Interactive. See some of you there!
Fashion illustrations and illuminated manuscripts. Civil War photos and Japanese prints. The NYPL Digital Gallery, launched today, provides free access to over 275,000 images (soon to be 500,000) digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the world-renowned New York Public Library collections.
Four years in the making, the project shows how a great cultural institution can use the internet to distribute its richest and rarest content to all comers. Covering the launch in The New York Times, Sarah Boxer writes:
Let the browser beware. The New York Public Library’s collection of prints, maps, posters, photographs, illuminated manuscripts, sheet-music covers, dust jackets, menus and cigarette cards is now online. If you dive in today without knowing why, you might not surface for a long, long time.
Visitors can use the images any way they choose:
You can collect ’em, enlarge ’em, download ’em, print ’em and hang ’em on your wall at home. All are free, unless, of course, you plan to make money on them yourself. (Permission is required.)
Barbara Taranto of the Digital Library Program headed the effort. (The full credits rival those of a major motion picture.) Carrie Bickner Zeldman, who, among other things, managed the technical team that built the software, briefly describes how the publishing system uses XML to ensure fast public delivery.
The Daily Report’s longtime pal Tim Murtaugh — he of Cloud King and Pirated Sites fame — informs us that his company is looking to hire standards-aware front end web experts:
IconNicholson, a Manhattan-based web shop, has openings for full-time client-side developers with strong, standards-driven HTML and CSS skills. Experience with JavaScript and server-side languages (ASP, PHP, etc) a plus, but not required. Must have an eye for both design and clean code. Send your resume to Tim Murtaugh [tmurtaugh AT iconnicholson.com] for more information.
IconNicholson has a strong design sensibility, to which Tim and his hires have added a respect for the user’s time and needs. As if that weren’t enough, the agency is housed on the eighth floor of the famous Puck Building, where Soho meets Nolita. Which means you will never lack for a good place to have lunch or a funky bar or gym in which to decompress after work.
In Issue 196 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
To the delight of gadget freaks and the consternation of some web designers and thinkers, the new Autolink feature in Google’s latest toolbar sticks links on your site that you didn’t put there.
For instance, if your company’s site includes a street address, a link to Google’s map service will magically sprout from your page when users click the Autolink button. Likewise, a book’s ISBN number will trigger a link to an Amazon page selling that book. The BBC and CNET cite additional examples.
Critics point out that with this technology Google is approaching the very thing Microsoft tried to do in 2001. See Chris Kaminski’s “Much Ado About Smart Tags” (A List Apart 22 July 2001) if you missed that drama. Kaminski cited three problems with Smart Tags:
Google has been a good corporate citizen and outstanding netizen for so long that one wants to give the company the benefit of the doubt. And, to be fair, consumers might derive benefit from Google’s new service — as, indeed, many might have benefited from Smart Tags. But Google’s new toolbar doesn’t solve the three problems cited above. It merely makes Google instead of Microsoft the arbiter of life and death in the information space.
You can’t stop a juggernaut in pursuit of its own increase, but you can do something about the part where they mess with your website, adding links you didn’t create.
Namely, you can download this script from Threadwatch, install said script on your server, and link to it from the <head>
of your web pages.
Drew McLellan explains how it works:
The script cycles through all the links in the page and removes any that are found to have been placed there by Google.
Obviously, the more links your page contains, the more work the script must do. Client-side wear and tear could go away like a bad dream if Google would do what Microsoft did with Smart Tags: namely, provide a meta tag that disables them. (Unlike Smart Tags, which were on by default, Google’s new Autolink feature is off by default; this is the company’s rationale for not providing a disabling meta tag.)
Please note that the toolbar is still in beta; the company is soliciting consumer feedback. Like previous Google toolbars, this one works only in Internet Explorer and only on the Windows platform. But most of its actual benefits, such as popup blocking and in-page Search, are built into newer browsers like Safari and Firefox.
In Issue 195 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
A passion for web standards can become a broken heart when effects that are easy to achieve with table layouts seem to defy the earnest CSS- and markup-conscious designer. Fortunately, new ALA author Nandini Doreswamy loves a challenge. In “Bulleted Lists: Multi-Layered Fudge,” she shows how to create two columns of bulleted lists in the flow of text.
In a special double issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites, Peter-Paul Koch shows how to separate behavior from structure and presentation via JavaScript “hooks,” and J. David Eisenberg explains how to make those hook-laden pages validate.
Now that you’ve separated your website’s (XHTML) structure from its (CSS) presentation, wouldn’t it be great to similarly abstract the behavioral (JavaScript) layer from the others? ALA prodigal Peter-Paul Koch shows how to use JavaScript Triggers to do just that.
In his article in this issue, Peter-Paul Koch proposes adding custom attributes to form elements to allow triggers for specialized behaviors. The W3C validator won’t validate a document with these attributes, as they aren’t part of the XHTML specification.
Not to worry! This article will show you how to create a custom DTD that will add those custom attributes, and will also show you how to validate documents that use those new attributes.
In the U.S., 1 February is the first day of Black History Month. This year it also marks the launch, by The New York Public Library, of In Motion: the African-American Migration Experience:
A sweeping narrative from the transatlantic slave trade to the Western migration, the colonization movement, the Great Migration, and the contemporary immigration of Caribbeans, Haitians, and sub-Saharan Africans. Told in historical texts, rare visual materials, and contemporary photo-journalism.
Although it is not instantly apparent, the site provides immediate access to rare documents in The Library’s collection. It is a web interface to non-web documents. In Motion is a joint production of NYPL’s Digital Library Program and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Hat tip: Carrie Bickner Zeldman, who helped birth the colossal site.
We would link to the newly launched Gunner Palace website even if it were not crisply designed and compellingly written.
The indie documentary Gunner Palace (“Some war stories will never make the nightly news”) chronicles the daily experiences of 400 young American soldiers headquartered in a bombed-out pleasure palace once owned by Saddam Hussein.
Compiled by co-directors Mike Tucker and Petra Epperleinand, the Gunner Palace blog...
...consists of notes from the production of the film in 2003–2004 and emails sent from 2/3 FA soldiers during their 410-day deployment to Baghdad and Najaf.
The film (view trailer) has been picked up for nationwide U.S. theatrical release on 4 March 2005. Leading up to the wider release, director Tucker and soldiers from the film have begun a sneak preview tour of select U.S. cities.
God bless the brave.
Issue 193 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, features Norm Carr and Tim Meehan’s gentle introduction to use cases:
One of the biggest problems in creating and delivering a site is how to decide, specify, and communicate exactly what we’re building and why. Use cases can help answer these questions by providing a simple, fast means to decide and describe the purpose of your project.
Also in this issue, please note that ALA’s translation policy has changed.
As the weekend approaches, I leave you with two good links and one interesting stinker: