This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in February 2003.

CSS and Web Editors

In the realm of GUI HTML editors, CSS is a step backwards. Don’t get me wrong: I love CSS, but the Dreamweaver MX graphical interface for CSS is atrocious. I’m mostly self-taught in regards to CSS, but I’ve been using DWMX as my tool. Unfortunately, MX simply gives you a slice of the available options but is by no means complete. My main complaint is that the interface is simply difficult to use. It’s like we jumped back 20 years to data entry screens. It’s time consuming and non-intuitive. Equally problematic is that DW doesn’t display pages with CSS correctly. It’s often way, way off compared to how Netscape and IE displays the page so the visual editing portion of DW then becomes useless and your stuck with the code view … and then, why use DW anyway if you’re just editing code?

I’m really hoping that this is a temporary situation. CSS is at the forefront of modern web design, and one would hope that Macromedia will significantly improve the CSS support in the next version of DW. They changed virtually nothing from DW 4.0 to DW MX in regards to CSS except that now it’s a little easier to directly edit the code.

Having come from print design myself, I’m a big fan of WYSIWYG. In the web realm, they’ve made a lot of progress. I used to use GoLive 4.0 and loved it, but moved to DW 3.0 a few years ago because that is what was becoming standard at the university. In that time, GoLive has more or less disappeared, and Dreamweaver has become king of the hill. DW MX is the first version that has a halfway decent GUI. The intergration of the graphical and code views is something that GoLive had years ago, so it’s nice to see it arrive in the basic DW product.

In the past year or so, I’ve become more tolerant of the code view. I did a lot of programming as a kid and in college, but once the web came around, my feeling was that it was first and foremost a graphical medium. In my opinion, a graphical medium deserves graphical editors. The print side is fairly well developed. Products like Xpress and InDesign feature sophisticated tools for manipulating the printed page. And Photoshop and Freehand are powerful photo and illustration editors. The web side though is still in development.

Part of the challenge is the speed at which the technology changes. HTML has become XHTML. CSS is gaining speed. And of course ASP, PHP, etc. add another dimension. So DW, while being a graphical editor, is essentially a programming tool: You plug in the elements and it writes the code. With CSS, Macromedia hasn’t really thought through how to approach this graphically; it is in the land of nuts and bolts.

As I increasingly create web content, both at home and here at the university, I am using the code view much more often. I’ve made the switch to sites based on XHTML and CSS, and that was the right thing to do. But now the tools need to catch up with the technology.

No Comments Yet »

Newspaper

After last night’s entry mentioning the WSJ, I’ve gotten a couple of emails from folks questioning that paper in light of the WSJ’s editorial position on the coming war in Iraq. My response is that the WSJ is one of the best newspapers out there. I obviously don’t read it for political news — I would be reading the NY Times or Washington Post if I wanted that angle — and while I typically disagree with the editorial page (it’s fairly conservative), I don’t let that hinder my love of the rest of the paper. I’ve been reading the Wall Street Journal ever since high school, and have always very much liked it reportage. It looks at business and cultural trends from a sociological perspective that I find absolutely fascinating. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a great paper.

Speaking of newspapers, I resubscribed yesterday to the Press-Citizen. After not getting the local paper for a year, I’ve been missing a lot of the university news that they would print. It’s a good place to find out what’s going on with the university. It’s a big enough school (30,000 students) that you need the press to keep track of everything that’s going on.

There are three daily newspapers in this town, but the P-C is really the one to get. The Daily Iowan of course is geared towards the students, and the Iowa City Gazette hasn’t made the competitive inroads they hoped to when they launched a few years back.

As an aside, I upgraded to Movable Type 2.63, and it looks like everything went okay. It’s a fairly easy system to install and is very slick once you get it up and running. My only complaint is that the documentation needs a rewrite — better organization and more user friendly.

No Comments Yet »

Subconscious

It’s really cold. I stayed home tonight and read the Wall Street J and this book I’m into titled “Unholy Ghost.” It’s a collection of essays, and fairly good at that. I drove about 5 hours yesterday back across hills and valleys to get back home. I find long-range driving to be conducive to thought — the long expanses of space allow a certain part of the brain to be opened — the subconscious. I also find that with reading books — ideas come up as if from nowhere.

It’s been a thoughtfilled seven days or so. I’ve been hashing things out with my mentor, who’s down south doing research. It’s like the nodal points that Gibson writes about. Ideas and events of a system become dense and reach a climax — the threads of multiple conversations converging to one point, if you will — and after that singularity, a fundamental change in operating rules of the system. Gibson looks at this from a global culture perspective, but I think the idea scales down considerably to many smaller systems. The Wall Street Journal had an article yesterday talking about a nodal point of sorts in biological research — a shift away from micro analysis (individual genes) to a macro-systems approach (looking at the entire organism).

No Comments Yet »

Operating Systems

I took this personality quiz… Click the link to take the quiz yourself.

Which OS are You?

Comments (1) »

Lunch, Dinner and a Play

Tomorrow night I’ll be seeing this at the E.C. Mabie Theatre. The university puts on about 5 or so mainstage productions a year. When I was a grad student here, I used to buy season tickets because they were so cheap, and the plays were great. I did that again this year, and I’ve been really enjoying it.

Death is in the news lately. First 21 people died at a club in Chicago on Monday morning. Then 120 people died in a subway in South Korea on Tuesday. And now 250 people died in a plane in Iran.

With that said, I’m looking forward to tomorrow. Lunch with Jane. Dinner with John. And then a play. Not a bad way to spend a day. On Friday I’m off to the home country for a few days.

No Comments Yet »

Photos & Friends

The red light is flashing several times a second. It is blinding, but I think I’ve gotten used to it over the years. When it doesn’t flash red, it flashes green. Red - green - red - green - red - red - green.

Here’s to old friends. I was thinking tonight of an old friend from Los Angeles. He sent me photos today of he and his wife. I haven’t seen him in person ever since he drove down to San Francisco to live (he later moved to LA). I still have this picture of him in my head from when he was studying at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I took this photo of him at that time. Now he looks … relaxed. Intense but relaxed. Both of them actually. They both look really good — healthy and happy. It’s hard to really know how people are when they’re far away. But pictures and emails and postcards help.

That’s the latest thing I’ve been doing: postcards. I sent out dozens of mix CD’s to announce the relaunch of danielstout.com. I included 2 postcards in each — one with a personal note from me and the other postpaid and with my address filled out. The first responses came within a day or two and now we’re up to about a 85% response rate. Of course it was a selective list that these were sent to.

So anyway, click the above photo from Chris to view.

Comments (1) »

Relaunch

With the relaunch of the Daniel R Stout dot com website comes a new mix CD fully 78 and a half minutes in length. The official version comes with fantastic cover art — to obtain a copy, write to me via the contact page. The mix is also available in streaming Real audio — go to the music page to stream the mix and look at the original cover art. If you’d like to create your own DanielStout.com Original Soundtrack Part II mix CD, here are the tracks:

1. The Band - The Weight
2. New Order - Mr. Disco
3. The Decemberists - Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect
4. Buena Vista Social Club - Pueblo Nuevo
5. Barry Adamson - Something Wicked This Way Comes (edit)
6. David Bowie - Sound and Vision
7. Cocteau Twins - Squeeze-Wax
8. OMD - So In Love
9. Ben Folds Five - Selfless, Cold and Composed
10. Sarah, Hanna and Leah Peasall - In The Highways
11. The Mighty Lemon Drops - Where Do We Go From Heaven?
12. Wilco - Jesus, etc.
13. Dead Can Dance - Don’t Fade Away
14. U2 - Electrical Storm (William Orbit Mix)
15. Nick Drake - Parasite
16. Sam Knutson - Wrecking Ball Man
17. Cassius - Planetz
18. Brodsky Quartet - Chanson de matin
19. The White Stripes - Death Letter

The previous Daniel R Stout dot com mix was also highly acclaimed — you can find track listings and cover art on the music page.

What else is new? The photos page has plans for updates. Feel free to browse around the site — this is a completely new design- and I hope to keep adding pages as time permits. Ciao.

No Comments Yet »