[Leica] Re: Haas

[Jeff Moore <jbm@oven.com>]

2000-12-06-19:08:45 Jim Brick:
> For a real treat, go to:
> 
> http://www.ernsthaasstudio.com

Idiots.

> A masterpiece in web design and photography.

I won't quibble over the photos.  A masterpiece in web design?
Hardly.

Let me count the ways.

  1) Completely dependent on Flash 4, rather than anything
     standards-based.  Confines viewers to those willing to keep up
     with the browser-and-plugin-of-the-week race.

  2) Doesn't even do what it purports to do -- display stuff if you
     have Flash 4 -- reliably.  The detection script (er, detection
     Flash movie) was apparently incapable of noticing that I do,
     indeed, have a v4.0 r12 Flash plugin.  I kept getting told to
     download a Flash plugin, which I HAD, dammit.  I had to look
     inside both the initial HTML page and the subsequent flash movie
     to find out that the net result of all that over-fancy detection 
     magic should be the loading of

       http://www.ernsthaasstudio.com/index2.html

     which indeed consented to play once I asked for it by name.

  3) It's an annoying mass of unnecessary animation which gets in the
     way of actually getting to the content.  The little navigation
     menus have to have their labels and the little lines they perch
     upon redraw oh-so-preciously before you can see 'em.  Then the
     same for the sub-menus.  If the photos and text are what you
     want, if you're not fascinated and entertained by the wondrous
     innovation (not!) of a Flash-based website squirming beneath your
     eyeballs, it's just wasted time.

  4) Would that the images (you know, the photos?  the things of
     importance?) were larger.  One of the genuinely cool things about
     Flash is how well it scales to arbitrary-sized displays; but of
     course photos aren't vectorized like the intrinsic Flash stuff,
     and so (I fully understand) you can't something for nothing --
     more available image detail would require more bandwidth, longer
     load times.  But hey, *that* -- detecting the client's browser
     resolution and possibly even some notion of available bandwidth,
     and feeding images accordingly -- would actually be a truly worthy
     subject for detection magic, if possible.

But it does look pretty.  Ever so tasteful.

Oh, and the standard caveat: I'm *definitely* not speaking for my
employer...