The Web is Expensive

It’s easy to forget that we work in a new and strange industry.  We surround ourselves with ourselves, so we take the nature of our product for granted.  But for the majority of web users, we create virtual products — they take up no space; their size, complexity, and location are indeterminate; they appear and disappear from the screen in an instant.  So how to value their worth?

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Drupal as a Prototyping Tool

There is a vast matrix that exists in my mind (there are also other, emptier spaces of such magnitude that we dare not approach). The matrix maps functional requirements, content structures, and media assets against out-of-the-box Drupal functionality, popular and flexible modules, and theming methodologies.

This matrix exists in a Platonic form where all of the requirements and conditions map neatly to available functionality and structures. It’s only when I populate it with the real-world facts of a project that gaps emerge. Those gaps identify the responsibilities and data structures that we’ll need to delegate to our own modules. Once we group these by logical or functional affinity, we have our module strategy.

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Flash and HTML layers: still a problem

Update, April 2009: Change.gov seems to have changed their video player size, so the working example in this entry no longer has a strict correlation between the video player and the image replacement.  The principle still holds, though, and it would be an easy fix to create a new replacement image using the naming conventions below. — msh

Happy 2009!  OK, back to work.

Note to developers and designers: you still can’t layer HTML over Flash, and you still need to design around it.  Sad, but true.  For instance, this page on change.gov has the classic problem: a Flash video player at the top of the page, and a menu that draws a layer on rollover.  The two are not friends.

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