I concur, Tony, although it took a little longer (5 mins) on my 56K dialup.
Just a quick reminder that the W3C has published the SVG (Scaleable Vector
Graphics) standard as a part of XML, and people like Adobe & the browser
manufacturers already are & will be supporting it. You can check it out at:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.html
There seems to be frequent reference to Flash in this forum - while I like
it, and have used it professionally since it was called FutureSplash (before
Macromedia bought it), I cannot recommend it be used as a delivery platform.
Flash has demonstrated the need for & a means of efficient delivery of high
quality (& interactive) graphics, but it is by no means a panacea.
Unfortunately, this also goes for Java - pluginless, yes, but you still have
to download the classes every time & the Java VM (the bit in the browser)
itself is around 7MB...
Some of the worst excesses of the web have been prompted by inappropriate
use of (admittedly) cool technology - but the lessons learned are being
applied by organisations such as W3C. If we all stick to agreed & emerging
standards, and apply them thoughtfully to user requirements, hopefully the
next generation of web content will be more generally accessible.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Crockford
Sent: 14 March 2002 13:02
Subject: Re: Demo geographical front-end to cultural collections
>Going back to the BL demo, I gave up after 10 minutes when
>my win386.swp
>file had grown to about 30mB and my resource meter was
>behaving oddly,
>but then I don't have an ISDN line, just an antique 56k
>modem on ordinary
>old BT.
I persevered out of curiosity and it only took about three minutes
to get to the interactive map. (56k modem, win2k)
Bit dull, I thought, really. :(
It could have been just as effectively done using html a bit of
JavaScript and some image maps.
The map was too small, but the page didn't fit my 800*600 window,
the thumbnails were tiny and the *big* images took too long to
download, with no way of knowing that was what was happening, I
clicked more than once (and got a lot of new windows!)
It was an odd and not at all intuitive interface
Of course the whole premise is that as a user I know where in the
world I want to look for something. I'm not sure that's a fair
assumption to make - the map of the world is unfamiliar to a lot of
people - why not a simple list of places?
I admire the technological achievement but question the wisdom of
the approach. I don't really like Flash, but if ever there was a
good project suited to it's talents this is one, especially as Flash
gives feedback on loading times and it can get somewhere interesting
while loading stuff in the background.
I hope the feedback has been useful, sorry it isn't more positive,
perhaps I'm not representative of the target audience - who are they
exactly? I guess they will know what Or.12551A means when it pops
up over a marker on the map.
Ho Hum.....
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