Discuss: Sliced and Diced Sandbags
by Rob Swan
- Editorial Comments
22 Untitled
I’m right with Brian on the semantics concerns.
posted at 02:52 am on August 23, 2006 by Chris Dumas
23 Benefits vs. Problems
First of all i would like to say that it is a great article and it shows things I thought were not possible.
But where would I use this? And how about all that extra code? Isn’t there a cleaner way to do it?
posted at 09:47 am on August 23, 2006 by Mihai Dragan
24
You know someone had to say this … while this is a neat concept, how is using a tool such as this semantically correct? Isn’t one of the points of ALA that we promote tools which are standards compliant?
Indeed, someone always does say it. In fact, I wrote a whole article on the subject last year. If you look through our archives, you’ll note that we do indeed favor semantically sound markup — but we also encourage innovation and trust our readers to figure out when it’s appropriate to use a given technique. I considered tagging this article with our experimental content warning, but I thought that y’all had probably gotten tired of the “use it wisely” warning for the extra-markup issue.
But where would I use this? And how about all that extra code? Isn’t there a cleaner way to do it?
The first question can only be answered by you. As for the others, we hope that the answer is yes. It delights us when our community of readers works out clever ways to improve the techniques our authors write about.
posted at 10:35 am on August 23, 2006 by Erin Kissane
25 Inspiration!
Thanks for the idea. I have for long been familiar with the demo already mentioned in the comments, but this gave me a new idea: A script that slices an image automagically. Sure, it isn’t as convenient for the designer as this approach, but is friendlier for both the server and the page viewer.
May I present, The UnBlobifier .
Please be gentle, this is just a rough sketch of the script and also my first widely published source
posted at 01:12 pm on August 23, 2006 by Henrik Paul
26 Untitled
Great idea, but the article itself is let down by having no links to see each stage working, only the raw code. And no final demo link either! At least there is a link in the comments.
I too echo the plea for the sandbags to fit the height of each text line. But what happens when the user increases the font size in real time?
Readers may be interested to check out Stu Nicholls’ fantastic approaches to wrapping text around images on his site:
1. http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/flow.html
2. http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/embed.html
posted at 02:55 pm on August 23, 2006 by Chris Hester
27 re: Chris Hester
It looks to me like this article uses the same technique as Stu Nicholls’ “fantastic approach to wrapping text around images”, except this article takes it a little further by automating the task of calculating element widths.
posted at 08:33 pm on August 23, 2006 by Justin Perkins
28 Count vertical pixels too
The second line of text in the final results screenshot looks to be awfully close to the part of the graphic underneath it. As long as we’re calculating horizontal sandbag distances, shouldn’t we be ensuring the same margins vertically too? I assume this is a minor algorithmic addition to the PHP scan of the image.
posted at 08:49 pm on August 23, 2006 by Uptown Toopranking
29 I think it will be useful
I will use a mix between the solution in this article and the old solution in curvelicious.
Thanks for the inspiration!
posted at 11:30 am on August 24, 2006 by Juanjo Espí
30 good idea!
Hi Rob, just wanted to say this is a nice idea. I’ve avoided doing this kind of thing as it has traditionally involved a rather more static solution. I haven’t tried it yet but when I have a use for it I will certainly give it a go as I appreciate anything that allows a bit of creativity!
Best of luck with fuelledoncoffee!
ps Hi to Andy!
posted at 01:13 pm on August 24, 2006 by Amy Gooch
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21 Untitled
Referencing the question about using “AJAX” above, if you mean dHTML (dont know why you’d have to communicate with the server for something like this) I’ve got a solution that’s mostly done. It uses points outputted for imagemaps (yeah, I found a use for them) to generate the divs at load time inside a specified div or class of divs. I was considering submitting an article to ALA until this article came out. If there’s interest, I’ll put the code up somewhere for others to look at.
posted at 02:26 am on August 23, 2006 by Sasha Sklar