Extreme Confusion

When we recently launched our website, www.osmosian.com, it was
classified by Jack Klein as "hideous" and "abusive", and by Randy
Howard as something that "looks like crap".

Others, however, said it was "nice and simple", "quite pretty", and a
"very slick" implementation of the AJAX philosophy.

We're confused. Can a woman be both unbearably ugly and delightfully
pretty at once? Of course not. So how can a web site be so?

Comments?

help (AT) osmosian (DOT) com wrote:

When we recently launched our website, www.osmosian.com, it was
classified by Jack Klein as "hideous" and "abusive", and by Randy
Howard as something that "looks like crap".

Others, however, said it was "nice and simple", "quite pretty", and a
"very slick" implementation of the AJAX philosophy.

We're confused. Can a woman be both unbearably ugly and delightfully
pretty at once? Of course not. So how can a web site be so?

Comments?

Ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

You have the outside washed and waxed nicely, but
the internals look they've been oiled with Crisco.


There is no reason to have two pages of javascript
to support such a simple page.


Suggest you redirect your need to program to server side
solutions.

That old kind of
image map is not done in a way that is accessible.

Suggest you see:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/imagemap/

--
mbstevens
http://www.mbstevens.com/

help (AT) osmosian (DOT) com wrote:

When we recently launched our website, www.osmosian.com, it was
classified by Jack Klein as "hideous" and "abusive", and by Randy
Howard as something that "looks like crap".

Others, however, said it was "nice and simple", "quite pretty", and a
"very slick" implementation of the AJAX philosophy.

We're confused. Can a woman be both unbearably ugly and delightfully
pretty at once? Of course not. So how can a web site be so?

Comments?

You also don't need ssl until you get to a critcal part (payment etc).

There is no reason to have two pages of javascript
to support such a simple page.

Actually out of the 212 lines of javascript, only about 60 are used for
the visual representation/navigation of the website. The rest are used
for the purchase and upgrade pages where the XMLHttpRequest object is
used to communicate with the server. Note that in those 60 lines,
support for the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys is included.
Also the design allows for easy insertion and deletion of pages.
Because each image map's "Prev", "Home", "Next" button calls a
javascript routine which dynamically figures out which page to go to,
there are very few static links that need to be updated. This makes for
a more reliable site.

That old kind of image map is not done in a way that is accessible.

What do you mean by "accessible"?

I will look into that article you sent. The main problem I had was that
I wanted the site to center horizontally and vertically in the screen.
This is difficult to do with CSS and get it to work in Internet
Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (the two most popular browsers). If you
know how to do this, let me know. I am always open to cleaning things
up.

Suggest you redirect your need to program to server side solutions

Believe me, I would much rather use Plain English on the server side
than that nasty javascript, but currently there is no clean way to
communicate to the server without having the page annoyingly flicker or
switch to another page without using the XMLHttpRequest object. Hence,
most of the javascript. If you know how to do these things with less
javascript, please let me know.

help (AT) osmosian (DOT) com wrote:

There is no reason to have two pages of javascript
to support such a simple page.
Note that in those 60 lines,
support for the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys is included.
Also the design allows for easy insertion and deletion of pages.
Because each image map's "Prev", "Home", "Next" button calls a
javascript routine which dynamically figures out which page to go to,
there are very few static links that need to be updated. This makes for
a more reliable site.

You need a <noscript> version of these links so that those
without JS or who aren't using it can navigate.

That old kind of image map is not done in a way that is accessible.


What do you mean by "accessible"?

alt = "some description of what this link is"
....is missing on every one of the areas.
A comment with a description doesn't do what is needed.

I will look into that article you sent. The main problem I had was that
I wanted the site to center horizontally and vertically in the screen.
This is difficult to do with CSS and get it to work in Internet
Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (the two most popular browsers). If you
know how to do this, let me know. I am always open to cleaning things
up.

Just do web searches for "CSS center vertical" and "CSS center
horizontal".

The actual point of the article is that you can use normal text
links arranged at a higher z-index over images, which makes it
easier for people on handhelds, text browsers, and people with
some handicaps to be able to use and understand the links more
easily.

Suggest you redirect your need to program to server side solutions


Believe me, I would much rather use Plain English on the server side
than that nasty javascript, but currently there is no clean way to
communicate to the server without having the page annoyingly flicker or
switch to another page without using the XMLHttpRequest object. Hence,
most of the javascript. If you know how to do these things with less
javascript, please let me know.

Any good book or web tutorial on Perl+CGI or PHP should give you
the information you need.

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006, mbstevens brought to wider attention that:

help (AT) osmosian (DOT) com wrote:

Note that in those 60 lines, support for the Home, End, Page Up,
and Page Down keys is included.

Eh? My browser already knows what to do with Home, End, PgUp and
PgDn, and I'm confortable with its choices. The last thing I'd want
is some strongarmed author with "better" ideas to interfere with that.

Because each image map's "Prev", "Home", "Next" button calls a
javascript routine which dynamically figures out which page to go
to, there are very few static links that need to be updated. This
makes for a more reliable site.

"For some small values of the term 'reliable' ..."

You need a <noscript> version of these links so that those without
JS or who aren't using it can navigate.

What the hon Usenaut *needs*, if designing for the WWW, is to stop
thinking that they're designing some custom application, and settle
down with the idea of going along with what all kinds of WWW reader
expect their browser to do on respectable WWW pages. Then fit their
*content* (assuming they have any) into the scope of that.

The O.P claimed to be offering a "web site", but when it responds like
this (this is the whole site, as seen by a text browser such as
Lynx, or presumably by an indexing robot):

___
/
The Osmosian Order of Plain English Programmers

[rect]
____________________ ____________________ ____________________
____________________
____________________

\___

- then I couldn't really agree with its reported categorisation as
"hideous" or "abusive" - I'd rate is as plain useless, in terms of a
web site.

Actually, there was even less to be seen on my graphical browser
(Mozilla, with JS disabled of course as for any as-yet-untrusted
site) - just a huge rectangle with a broken image icon in it, nothing
more. Site information says it contains 0 links: so that's Game Over.

Exploring the information shown at
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=www.osmosian.com
only confirms my impression that this is a hollow shell, as far as the
WWW is concerned, whatever its hidden glories as some kind of
application might be.

It may be that it does something interesting in an appropriate
enviroment, but the initial impressions don't tempt me to go any
further.

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006, mbstevens brought to wider attention that:


help (AT) osmosian (DOT) com wrote:

Because each image map's "Prev", "Home", "Next" button calls a
javascript routine which dynamically figures out which page to go
to, there are very few static links that need to be updated. This
makes for a more reliable site.


"For some small values of the term 'reliable' ..."

And requiring imaginary numbers, no doubt.

There seems to be some deviant to Fudd's law[1] that requires
one's first few sites to be as complex and unmanageable as
possible, and impossible for many visitors to view.


[1] Fs.T., circa 1965.

help (AT) osmosian (DOT) com wrote:

When we recently launched our website, www.osmosian.com, it was
classified by Jack Klein as "hideous" and "abusive", and by Randy
Howard as something that "looks like crap".

Others, however, said it was "nice and simple", "quite pretty", and a
"very slick" implementation of the AJAX philosophy.

It depends on which part of the site they were critiquing: the design or

the code.

Visual:
The design is minimalist. The use of only two colors and line drawings
certainly gets my attention because it is so different from many other
sites rich in color and clutter.

Operation: (Likely the source of most of the "hideous" comments)
At first I thought there was only the home page, sort of like a demo
page. None of what looked like links acted like links, e.g.: mouseover, or
a destination link in the status bar. Only when I accidentally clicked
when over a link did I discover it was functional.
The normal navigation methods are overridden. That pissed me off. After
going to another page I hit the "back" button and went to the *site*
before this one rather than the previous page.
If the site is the result of "Plain English Programming", I think you
are in trouble.

Code:
- Ugh.
- No DTD (doctype)
- Incorrect language spec
- Ancient coding style
- With Javascript disabled, all I get is a blank screen

We're confused. Can a woman be both unbearably ugly and delightfully
pretty at once? Of course not. So how can a web site be so?

"Pretty" is subjective. Some people think Paris Hilton is delightfully

pretty; I think she is unbearably ugly. Whose opinion is "correct"?

--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

On 18 Feb 2006 08:06:46 -0800, help (AT) osmosian (DOT) com wrote:

When we recently launched our website, www.osmosian.com, it was
classified by Jack Klein as "hideous" and "abusive", and by Randy
Howard as something that "looks like crap".

Others, however, said it was "nice and simple", "quite pretty", and a
"very slick" implementation of the AJAX philosophy.

We're confused. Can a woman be both unbearably ugly and delightfully
pretty at once? Of course not. So how can a web site be so?

Comments?

I see nothing on your site:
http://www.media-marketing.biz/temp/osmosian.jpg

I would not dare to call it a site, it's a gallery.


--
o'tom po'tom

help (AT) osmosian (DOT) com wrote:

When we recently launched our website, www.osmosian.com, it was
classified by Jack Klein as "hideous" and "abusive", and by Randy
Howard as something that "looks like crap".

Others, however, said it was "nice and simple", "quite pretty", and a
"very slick" implementation of the AJAX philosophy.

We're confused. Can a woman be both unbearably ugly and delightfully
pretty at once? Of course not. So how can a web site be so?

Comments?

help,

Excellent visual impression. Simple, eye-catching, and direct.

But it doesn't function well (I can't resize the text, it requires a
fixed-size window, links aren't identified as such) and a look at the
source makes it clear that it takes no account of the realities of the web.

So it's beautiful when observed from a distance, but when you get up
close you start to see the warts and wrinkles and if you look under the
covers you wonder how much you had to drink when you picked up this dog.
(Hey, it's your analogy... :-)

What you need is a dose of the Truth. See
http://pages.prodigy.net/chris_beall/TC/index.html

Chris Beall