onMayFirst=site.Reboot();
Published 1 May 2005
Hi! You've stumbled upon a blog post by a guy named Ryan. I'm not that guy anymore, but I've left his posts around because cool URIs don't change and to remind me how much I've learned and grown over time.
Ryan was a well-meaning but naïve and priviledged person. His views don't necessarily represent the views of anyone.
As part of the May 1 Reboot and CSS Reboot initiatives by the web design community, RyanCannon.com features a spiffy new coat of paint. I hope it doesn't seem as much of a last-minute effort as it actually was—our hero had a tiny case of design block for the larger part of the week. I hope you enjoy, and please vote for my site at the above mentioned contests. If you're viewing this in Internet Explorer, my apologies. You can get a real web browser here, here, here (OS X-only), here (OS X-only), here (Windows), or here (Windows). You really have no excuse to be using that trash if you're not using Mac System 9.
The site uses an unprescedented amount of javascript. As I've come to realize, javascript is not the devil's plaything. So long as you make it unobtrusive and degrade gracefully, javascript is a very robust programming language. You'll note the scripts creating the pull-down navigation bar and the Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR—a.k.a. pretty fonts). Look to see more javascript coming through RyanCannon.com in the future; I'm working on a javascript implementation of Web Forms 2.0 amongst my other (read hundreds of) projects.
The reason this site performs so poorly in Internet Explorer is that it relies largely on transparent PNGs, something that IE does not play nicely with, although their developers have promised to do so in the next version. This puts them only three or four years behind the game, but what else can you expect from a monopoly?
If you are stuck without being able to see the new design, don't panic: there's still more for you after my reboot. Choose the academic theme to see the new design ported over from my undergraduate portfolio. All this with nary a change to my semantic markup. Isn't CSS amazing?