Gimlé

Some might have noticed that I’ve been doing small sort of design tweaks over the last couple of weeks.

Those who noticed probably did so because this site did something violently nasty to their computer. I had a crasher bug going on Safari for a couple of days on the individual post pages.

It had something to do with FORM CSS code—couldn’t isolate it because it didn’t appear when pages were displayed from file and working on a server from college (where I have access to OS X machines) is a pain.

Also, some of the :hover code (got the idea from Design Meme, found via Zeldman only works on kthml- or Gecko-based browsers.

The reason why I applied it is that it is “the right thing to do” hypertextually speaking. Pick up any old book on hypertext theory and design, preferably one that that predates the web (they did a lot of research on the subject, y’know) and you’ll find out that using constant typographic distinctions for links leads to added emphasis at inappropriate places, as well as a whole host of other unwanted side-effects.

This would be alright if you are doing an “outline-style” weblog, where you post your short and fairly succinct bullet-pointed thoughts on a regular basis. But it’s not quite what you want when you’re writing longer passages.

Mark Bernstein’s and Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace has, if memory serves me, a state switch thing. Normally you read the posts without any typographic distinctions for links. Then you hold down a key on your keyboard and all the links appear in the post (I hope that I’m not making this up, been ages since I last read a Storyspace hypertext).

This :hover business, when it works, makes sure that links you haven’t followed are only subtly distinguished when you’re reading and that they pop out, underlined and obvious, when you hover your mouse pointer over the text’s body.

It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes.

I might start working on a project next week that just possibly might get half a dozen interesting non-techy people weblogging on a regular basis.

Again, we’ll see how that goes.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.