Resistance

In the middle of The Second World War a 10-minute cartoon premiered in Nazi Germany. Weather-beaten Melody follows the story of a wasp flying through a meadow who comes across an abandoned phonograph and inadvertently brings it to life by dragging his stinger across the record. Soon, insects and wildlife from all around are dancing together and enjoying the new sound brought to the countryside. It is a remarkable artefact, not just for the level of skill required to achieve some difficult animation techniques, such as rotoscoping, which would rival the sophistication of Walt Disney’s output of that time. More significant is the content and the themes that the cartoon portrays for a work produced under the scrutiny and with the finance of a racist, totalitarian state. There is a strong element of escapism to the story in the way that the creatures throw off the shackles of work, and this was typical of a significant majority of German propaganda directed at a war-weary population. However what is surprising is the way in which the cartoon challenges Nazi social and cultural beliefs in its portrayal of a diverse, happy community.

Nazi doctrine deemed many races and cultures to be inferior and dangerous to the National Socialist movement. To this end many forms of popular music from America, such as Jazz, were banned outright and could not be played or listened to. German musicians responded to the ban with Swing, which was a close but tolerated relation to Jazz, sans saxophone. One such example is the song featured in the cartoon written by Bruno Balz. Around this music an eclectic mix of creatures, a clear metaphor for a cosmopolitan society, socialise and live together peacefully. This contrasts sharply with the Nazi’s treatment of East European prisoners of war, many of whom died in captivity or were murdered, as were innocent Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses amongst the civilian populations of the countries the Nazis occupied. Perhaps the conflict between director Fischerkoesen’s message of tolerance against the prevalent practise of discrimination served to confuse some of the people who saw the film, and made them question the morality of their leaders. The impact of such of a film is very difficult to measure without written testimony, but as an artifact of resistance it provides some comfort, that even in the darkest chapters of human history there were sophisticated attempts to subvert and change a corrupt system from within.

How to build a browser-friendly website

I have been overhauling my website these last few weeks: adding content, improving the design of the layout, and re-writing the code from near-scratch. It was a steep and tedious learning curve. Forever will I be grateful to the technical geeks that litter internet forums and blogs, fielding questions that have been asked many or few times and making my life a little easier each time I hit a brick wall. Usually this wall is in the form of Internet Explorer, which I now despise. That should be too strong an emotion for a piece of software to induce, but I fully support .net magazine’s Bring Down IE6 campaign. This particular version is too old to be used in 2009, and its continued use is a burden to innovative website design; in their words the campaigners ask if it is “finally time to take IE6 behind the shed and shoot it”? Thankfully, I have now addressed my concerns about my website’s accessibility, as every page I host is now standards compliant XHTML. This means that every modern browser should render my website the way I intended.

Each project includes scans of the related sketchbook presented alongside; additional projects have been added and are now categorised by date with a separate category for competition briefs completed outside of university. This weblog has also been reformatted to match the rest of website. However, for me the biggest change is in the code, and ditching old habits to move with the times to create a more accessible website. These are my recommendations for creating a modern website:

1. Understand what the doctype means and does to make sure you are using the most suitable one. It can affect how browsers render your webpage and determine whether code is understood or not. For example if you are using deprecated html tags (like <font>) you may need a ‘transitional’ rather than ‘strict’ doctype.

2. Specify font sizes in ems or percentages. Web browsers have a default font size that individual users can change to suit their needs. It is commonly set to 16px. You can set all font sizes in relation to the default using ‘em’s or percentages, so for most people 1em would equal 16px and 0.5em would equal 8px.

3. Similarly, specify heights, widths and margins in ems or percentages where possible. That way divs in you layout can be scaled in relation to the default font size, and there is less chance of it breaking if someone increases the font size.

4. Don’t use tables to create your webpage’s layout. This was common before CSS was widely supported by browsers. Instead you should use divs to structure your content and leave tables for presenting tabular data. Your pages should load quicker and be rendered properly for years to come.

5. Don’t use javascript to create rollover effects. This is the method employed before CSS was properly supported. CSS can be used to create instantaneous rollover effects. This is better as the rollover effect works for internet users who have javascript disabled.

There is more information readily available on the internet as these issues have been covered and discussed for years, so go forth and make browser-friendly websites.