A Personal Note
About Dragon Under Glass
Here There Be Dragons
The dragon has been both a positive and a negative symbol throughout
many cultures. Here, we focus on the positive. At Dragon Under Glass,
the dragon is a
metaphor for the turbulent forces of creativity and everything associated
with it: emotion, strength, truth, inspiration, and fire.
The glass encasing the dragon is
control, which writers and designers
attempt to exert over creativity. It is also the focusing lens--of
the eye, of the
camera, of the monitor, or of the lightbulb. Glass can reflect,
scatter, or project a
true image.
And yes, the pun is intended: Dragon Under Glass could be
a feast of creativity.
About the Dragon Under Glass Web Site
Dragon Under Glass is a unique combination of a personal
and a business Web site.
Although I much prefer to "hand code" HTML, the layout of this Web site
was an experiment with Adobe ImageReady
and was not hand-coded. My hand-coded material is generally much cleaner.
I will probably not be able to resist the urge to clean it up by hand
when time permits.
ImageReady is a utility which saves time when cutting up a complex image
for the Web. It automatically creates tables and HTML for your layout,
and it even writes JavaScript mouseovers for you, but you have to
know what you're doing to fix errors when it makes mistakes. For example,
if you use an apostrophe in an image's "message" attribute (which for
usability's sake should be a "title" attribute in an HREF tag, but instead
affects the status bar), ImageReady does not "escape" the apostrophes
and thus creates JavaScript errors on your page. Also, the
HTML output under default settings violates many good programming
practices, causing HTML validators to choke, but it is better than most
automatically generated HTML, and you can change some of the options
to get better code. All in all, an impressive tool.
--The Webmaster, Dragon Under Glass
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