This is a promising decision. Stackhouse is a top-rate journalist and it can only mean that the Globe is committed to top-rate journalism.
Matt Hartley at The Globe and Mail offers a refreshingly balanced look at Canadian copyright law
As usual, editor in chief Edward Greenspon spends too much time crowing about the paper, but the redesign is an improvement at first glance. I’m glad to see some original, new design elements like the “above the fold” photos on article pages, and the elegant pull quotes.
They also seem to be mixing video right into stories, which helps move the site away from just being a printed newspaper on the web.
Every other web designer is linking to this, so I might as well do it too.
For the record, we aren’t supporting IE6 on Dshbrd because doing so isn’t worth our time given the target audience. But the sad truth is that a significant number of people still use this slow, broken browser.
Arthur Erickson, who died yesterday, was perhaps Canada’s pre-eminent architect in his time, though his buildings can be found across the world. This photo essay from 2006 shows off his often controversial work. My personal favourite is the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. I also spent a year at Simon Fraser University and found the endless grey concrete under endless grey clouds… well, endlessly depressing. But it was and still is considered an achievement by many. (It is attractive and unusual enough to have been used for several locations on Caprica for Battle Star Galactica.)
Erickson’s work is immediately recognizable without being outlandish, and that was perhaps his biggest achievement.
The joys of cross-browser CSS opacity in 2009:
-ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50)";
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50);
opacity: .5;
The order is important for the two filters — the first one is for Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and the second one is for IE7. The last one is for normal, socially well-adjusted browsers.
My new hockey playoff pet peeve: the way commentators talk about “losing home-ice advantage” when the road team wins one or both of the first two games in a best of seven. Home-ice advantage doesn’t transfer. The advantage is that the team starts in its own arena and it gets the last game in its own arena, if needed. That’s it! That’s still true even if the team loses home games. You could say the advantage is wasted, or it’s been neutralized, but the other team never “gains” home-ice advantage because no matter what, they will never play more games at home in the series.
End rant.
