Now this is amazing to me. I ordered a bunch of parts for my Vespa (pictures coming!), and though Scootrs took a while to get the order ready, it took just 2 days to ship. From Vietnam. I know I’m a wierdo, but I’d love to see a documentary tracking that package from its source to its destination. Oh, and I could’ve saved $10 or so by selecting shipment by barge, which takes about 4 months (!).

As rapidly as internet technology is said to progress, it still seems like the framework for content delivery is mired in the era of text-only pages being shuffled from one university to another. Like it or not, the web is now a multimedia-rich environment, and its structure should change to accommodate this. The W3C, however problematic, is still a great standards body and deserves ISO status. Web standards are desperately needed, but progress has been too slow. Too often, good ideas stagnate (sorta like gnu ones). Maybe we need to “think outside the box” to move things along. Here are my own radical ideas for the web:

On-the-Fly Font Distribution System
When a job is professionally printed, great pains are taken to make sure that the printer has the necessary fonts. If this was not done, then layouts would only contain the dreaded courier default. Now imagine that every printed piece you ever laid eyes on contained the same 2 or 3 fonts. Deja vu? The world wide web allows easy transfer of text, and an HTML file can specify the font used to render it. But we resign ourselves to using ubiquitous system fonts: arial, helvetica, geneva, etc., or else our text reverts to the user’s default. The only way to break free is by embedding text in an image or a flash movie (or some other back-door solution). These practices are SEO suicide, however, as we need searchable text for SE bots to read and index. My proposed solution? Do as flash does! Send the browser a compressed file containing only the characters needed to render the page (or the whole alphabet when needed; ie. forms, dynamic content). Then add a link to said file in the head section, and voila! Text that is beautiful and searchable.

Template file
This would work like a style sheet, only with content. Instead of style info, classes would contain text, images and other content. If you’ve ever used Dreamweaver, you know why this is a good idea. The user would download repeated content only once, and it would be stored in the browser cache. You could change content site-wide by manipulating just one file! As I say, just like style sheets, but for content. Just come up with an XML-based file format, and we’re good to go with this one.

SVG & SMIL
I know, I know; not my ideas, but we desperately need a new way to jump-start these formats. It ain’t gonna happen on its own, folks. Here’s my solution: Start a group dedicated to developing quality freeware SVG and SMIL editors. The W3C should sponsor and fully endorse this. Illustrator exports SVG just fine, so SMIL’s the biggie here. Let’s face it: we need a program that is to Flash what Gimp is to Photoshop. A huge, wonderful Flash-like program that edits SVG graphics, creates tween animation, edits sound files, works with bitmaps, utilizes something akin to actionscript (javascript? LOL!) with a GUI like Flash’s. Layers, keyframes; the whole 9 yards. This will finally bring down Flash, since that’s what all you standardistas want.  I love Flash and stand by it, but I’m telling you: this is how you bring down Goliath. And I’ll reluctantly admit that the internet will be better for it.

…and sent the creator of MS Word into space!

Actually, that’s really cool. If the global economy is going to run the earth, we may as well reap some positive benefits. Like space tourism! Because America can’t properly fund NASA and 2 wars. So let the wealthy do it.  They have effectively all the
money in the world, so they should spread it around. And I don’t mean to vineyards and limo-makers. Cheers to philanthropy and research into cool technologies.

Now about that Internet Explorer team…

It’s amazing what you learn when people more picky than yourself complain about things you would normally let slide by. I’ll reluctantly admit that this occurs when anal-retentive individuals weigh in on layouts. (The anal make good designers– insert joke here) And thoroughness certainly prevents problems at the printer. But I’m learning the most these days about web design. And get this: it’s from clients who don’t know squat about the internet! They just know when they see something they don’t like. A few examples:

Drop-downs & Flash: Everyone knows that flash and DHTML don’t mix. Drop-down menus and the like disappear behind flash objects, and who knew there was a fix? It’s as simple as adding a wmode parameter to your html (wmode=”opaque”). This causes the flash to render within the layout, rather than on top and apart from it. This slightly affects performance (nothing I’ve noticed), though not prohibitively as is the case with transparent windowless mode.

The Eolas Problem: Solves the IE7 “boxes around objects” and “click to activate” issues. Detailed here.

Image Toolbar: IE6 garbage, though I was amazed there was actually a fix for it. When you hover over a decent photo in IE6, you get a toolbar with icons to save, print, etc. Purportedly to save us the trouble of right-clicking. Throw in the head section, and goodbye toolbar!

Those first two are pure gold, by the way.