Browsers download markup / designed to take tag soup; you don’t have to make it formatted properly. SGML parsers are loose, XML parsers get valid dated in. XML parsers can produce a DOM 3-10x faster.
Why XSLT should be part of you toolkit
Unlike CSS you can add new elements or rearrange
Easy to learn and program, if you take a functional and not a procedural approach.
Fast processor is built into major browsers (IE, FF, Opera, not Safari)
XML isn’t going away. The new tech of the semantic web. XSLT is the easiest way to convert the one to the other.
Joe Orr
When writing XSLT style, you need to think functionally, not procedurally.
Don’t write so many if/thens for/each crap. Just think about applying on key terms as you come across the element you’re manipulating.
I highly recommend that you take advantage of the presentations that they’ve put online of these. These visual aids are great and really got me thinking about how grids could help me design better web page layouts.
I’ve not yet managed to integrate their lessons into my own theme yet ) or, if I have, I have done so unconsciously ), buuuuut think that I may try to put together a grid-based theme at some point in the future ( although I’m exceedingly loth to deal with PHP hell again any time soon ).
I’ve actually been quite inspired since I took the class and have acquired several key books on the topic:
Josef Müller-Brockman’s: Grid Systems in Graphic Design
Meggs’ History of Graphic Design
Making and Breaking the Grid by Timothy Samara
Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style
Between these few tools, I really found my vocabulary embiggened in terms of graphic design. Much like the dreaded “blub paradox” - you don’t know that there’s a richer, more scientific, and more structured way of looking at layout and even paper itself until someone teaches you that there’s a vocabulary out there, of which you are largely ignorant, that explains something you take for granted, and which you are frequently thankful and rely upon.
Another SXSW speaker, the pre-stalker-meltdown Kathy Sierra described this as having “a higher-res experience”. She described that having worked a mixing board, she can’t go to a concert without noting when the mix is just a little bit off.
“Oh gee, just a little bit more base in the snare….”
I suppose it’s similar to the frustration I experience watching others play video games I love. I’m horrible to do this with.
“What, of course the big pile of toilet paper is what you need to roll into your Katamari next! No go in reverse about 20 revolutions, hang a….dammit why are you rolling up those rinky-dink spiders, that’s bull… ( sorry, Mom )”
Infused with a new-found love for grids and an understanding of their hidden, subtle, yet powerful ordering presence ( it’s like pyarimadine sugars that way ), I thought of one of my favorite philosophy book covers. The cover from Ricœur’s The Conflict of Interpretations by Northwestern press.
I took a scan of the page and then proceeded to add a grid to it to try to understand the layout and positioning used. To me it’s very European, very clean, very modern, and the presence of that much Helvetica adds to the sense of rationality.
Take a look at the gridded scan as I describe features.
The unit of measure seems to be squares of 16 pixels. From these pixels larger blocks are fabricated. The vertical space between the text and title area to the picture is 320pixels = 16×2×10. The space between the “y” in Phenomenology is 88 pixels to the left edge of the “I” in Interpretations. 88 is 16×5.
This is very interesting to me. As i started to look for more spaces I came to see the number 16’s central importance to this layout.
I don’t think I would have noticed, or cared that someone noticed and cared so much to lay things out as painstakingly as this. What I can say is that I’m hugely glad that those typographers at SXSWi gave this design amateur a chance to have a richer appreciation of their craft, art, and verily, science.
On March 13th my world became a little bit weirder and a little bit richer as I watched Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. It tells the story of an American boy named Noel BrelEngel, who heads to Los Angeles and joins a trio called The Walker Brothers. The Walkers have minor success in the early Sunset strip scene, but then head to Jolly Old England where their success is of a much larger and much more lucrative variety.
There they seem to tap into a post-war ennui psychology that ties the bourgeois-making-tea-staring-
out-the-tenement-development that defined Britain. Listening to the music you hear the heavy reverb, the Phil Spector influence overwhelming the headphones. Unmissable is the driving bassline and Scott’s present, urging baritone.
Now, to this point in the film, I was intrigued that I had never heard of this band.
The Break Up
Eventually the Walker Brothers ( neither Walker, nor brothers, discuss ) break up and Scott starts releasing edgy matrial. English translations of the chansons of Jacques Brel about the seedy side ( a decade ahead of Lou Reed ) of life and, somehow, his core audience sticks with him.
Yet it was clear that is not thinking of this being the limit, Wikipedia notes Walker studying Gregorian chant, dissonances, and other elements that made his work completely indescribable.
Scott proceeds to do a “Doors on Ed Sullivan” and continues to be booked as a pop singer, but performs his exploratory and, occasionally shocking material. His emotional state and distaste for fame push him into being a near recluse, separating his albums by intervals of whole decades.
The film chronicles Scott’s unworldly use of vibrato and analyzes his harmony content as being a counterpoint between dissonance and implied resolution. It’s eerie, it’s creepy, it’s disconcerting and the lyrical content, swimming in vibrato hints of tortured nightmares of a hellish landscape.
In short, music to play Silent Hill to.
Lyrics like:
And I used to be a citizen
I never felt the pressure
I knew nothing of the horses
nothing of the thresher.
Or
Do you swear that the breastbone was bare?
I saw it, and made my escape.
Do you remember what happened to most of the children?
You were in charge of the rolling stock.
Or
“I’m the only one left alive…aaahhh….live. I’m the only one left alive.”
Make you know that this person is doing something dramatically different to the thing that you call “song”. He’s somewhere beyond “song”.
The film footage shows vivid scenes of a percussionist beating pork loin in a syncopated beat with his bear hands. This providing core background to Scott’s vocals.
The impressionistic feel of horror and modernity and convenience and horror really work together in the track “30 Century Man”.
See the dwarves and see the giants
Which one would you choose to be?
And if you can’t get that together
Here’s the answer, here’s the key
You can freeze like a 30 Century Man
Like a 30 Century Man
I’ll save my bread and take it with me
‘Til a hundred years or so
Shame you won’t be there to see me
Shakin’ hands with Charles De Gaulle
Play it cool and Saranwrap all you can
Be a 30 Century Man
You can freeze like a 30 Century Man
Like a 30 Century Man
Like a 30 Century Man
Through all of this Lauren and I have started to laugh a bit about the Walker dramatics. It’s a good laugh to drum arhythmically and recite the grocery list with Walkerian vibrato:
Tiiiiilllll a slap moooook
slap Cereal Cerealcereallllll
Salad Dressing!
But as I think about the miages and scapes I know that this man is doing Art and it disturbs and jars me, and that is rather rare.
Scott and Popular Music
I think under Walker’s presence I can understand the baritone over-vibrato’d stylings of Andrew Eldritch of the Sisters of Mercy or Ian Curtis of Joy Division. Their idol was this man, this man out of phase with the pop music which bore him into a fame he didn’t really seem to care for.
Video Game
I definitely hear Walker’s influence in Japanese video games of the late 90’s and even today. Silent Hill has got to be the most Walkerian soundtrack ever. Walker used rusty wheels as an instrument, their metal grinding metal. I hear it in the palette of Silent Hill. I hear it in the ambient mood shifts as the Silent Hill characters emerge from the other world, where neutral, but not hospitable], long tones re-calibrate but do not release.
It was an accident that we walked into that movie, it happened to be on when we left SXSWi, but I believe that Lauren and I both feel that our sonic palette is now ever so much more wide.
I realize this is coming some 2 months late from the event, nevertheless, in Google, every moment of history is now, so putting these words to bits late is no crime
During SXSW I saw this shirt everywhere.
Congratulations Target, with this particular item you hit your target demographic square in the chest.
You hit the:
Post-religious, but spiritual ( Buddha ), educated ( correlate to earning power and choices elsewhere in this summation ), making enough money to have disposable income but not so much that they’d be snobby about actually buying clothes at Target, working in the tech industry, Mac-inclined, likely to have relaxed workplace clothing strictures, buys pre-faded so that machine-wash isn’t a hassle male between 21 and 35.
Madison avenue I am your lapdog.
Had I been able to get over the sheer embarrassment that I associate with using Twitter during the conference I might well have organized a Buddha shirt guy meetup
The 12th was the last full day post SXSW Interactive so Lauren and I decided to camp finish off the conference with two movies ( sorry MediaTemple after-party ).
After having our brain matter crammed full of AJAX and Typography and XML and Design it was time for us to catch a much more passive form of entertainment.
The amazingly lucid Mark Boulton and his colleague Richard Rutter presented this excellent ( and beautiful ) presentation on “Why Typography on the Web Sucks” ( it seems that most winning presentations have quasi-inflammatory titles ).
These fine men from across the Atlantic are generous enough to share their content.
