Drenched with Ink

Well, I really didn’t see this until earlier, so I’m sorry this is so late for those that were looking for someone to post to. Location technologies are becoming so mainstream that you rarely even notice the innovation anymore. When GPS came out, we were all like “Wow, this is amazing”. Since then there has been phenomenal advancement in the technology. Think about google maps and google earth and you begin to see where this could go. Not to mention that a good portion of people have a GPS navigation system in their car. OnStar has made the headway in that area.

In our industry location awareness technology will go hand in hand with the web. Anytime someone wants to know where the movie they want to see is playing, they can go to the web and find it. Also it is quite interesting how google maps is revolutionizing the way we think about maps and getting around. I think that as we move forward, the websites we create will have more location technology added to them as a basic feature. Moving forward, I see this feature being added to web pages designed for mobile media, such as the iPhone and other mobile devices. I am kind of worried about the amount of tracking that is going on.

Here are a few things to think about:

http://locationtechnology.blogspot.com/

http://www.psfk.com/2008/07/location-aware-technology-and-the-threat-of-constant-connectivity.html

http://www.networkcomputing.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60401125

When looking over the CSS3 information, the first thing I could say is oh my god. What is all this stuff? Where is my CSS that I learned and have become accustomed to? After a cursory glance I felt lost and was wondering if I would have to look for a CSS3 class to help me understand what was going on. Upon further review, I can see the benefits of what CSS3 is trying to accomplish. They are trying to make CSS more dynamic in what it can do, as well as how it can look. I refer to striping lines in a document (alternating color bars). The old way that was used required some ajax or javascript, but now you can do this with CSS.  http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/#typenmsp under structural pseudo classes. Items like this can help by having more dynamic styling tools to work with.

Overall I think that the transition will require more in depth learning and research, as the technical aspects read like stereo instructions. I think that CSS3 is leaning more towards programmers than designers, and this worries me a bit. Before I felt that CSS was the designer’s tool, and javascript, ajax, and other languages were for programmers. Now it seems like they are trying to take this away from designers.

CSS3 will only be worth the trouble if all browsers conform to what CSS3 is capable of doing. I did not read anywhere that all browser makers were on board and will make their browsers fully CSS3 compliant. So to me it does not matter if we have a new tool if it does not work for all browsers. Its like having a paper cutter that only cuts 8.5 x 11 paper if it is black cardstock. I understand that this is a step towards that, but I think we need to get the browsers compliant before we try to write new stuff to create for them.

I did find some neat stuff for CSS3. These are listed below:

CSS3 quickguide: http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/2007/11/05/css-3-quick-reference-panel

some pointers and great information here: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/css3psuedoclasses

the CSS3 selectors: http://www.cssdog.com/css3.html

some tutorials and examples: http://www.css3.com/