Re: [WSG] Standard Hacks?

[scott parsons]

Rimantas Liubertas wrote:
Can you name some industries?
 

Well ok...
currently I work for a large ad agency and a lot of the work we get is 
for FMCG campaigns which have turn arounds of hours (including several 
revisions of  art direction, client changes and legal). Most of the 
creative directors and art directors around here think print, most of 
the clients have no idea and we certainly never get to talk to them anyway.
(that is on the 'interactive side' on the 'B2B' side I usually get to 
make the rules)

Formerly I did some consulting for the UK customs and exise where I was 
consulting on browser requirements (this was in early 2002)  and one of 
the issues we had was that in the UK they have to keep a record of legal 
documents, and by a record I mean an exact printed record... so any 
document displayed online had to look EXACTLY the same down to the 
millimetre. At the time I advised that this was not possible.

I've also worked for entertainment (MTV, compuserve, peppers ghost (3d 
TV animation)), and a bevy of other sites during the dot com boom era...
And even today most art directors and clients think that the web IS print.

Why not to export entire page from photoshop as GIF, JPEG, or PNG and put
it on the website? That's the only way I know to get pixel percision.
How do you and your clients imagine pixel precision in screen readers, mobile phones
and PDAs? 
How do they know is this layout pixel presice or not?
For me talks about pixel prescion is an indicator that nobody really cares what and whom this website is for.
 

HA! you joke but I've had to do that before... Often the actual end 
client is a half dozen or more layers away from my team and everyone in 
between has different agendas and different understandings of what is 
going on.
In the advertising realm mostly they haven't even heard of screen 
readers, and phones and PDAs... not even a blip on their radar.
Remember that there is much more than just websites out there... we do 
micorsites, one pagers that are basically just online fliers and of 
course emails...
trying to get pixel precision is crazy I know... but there are dozens of 
reasons why it is also often required.

>Patrick Lauke wrote:
Or it might be time to educate your client with regards to "the web is not
print". What's next: discussions about exact colour matching, across all
browsers?
Well I have tried this from time to time... whenever possible with examples of 
where web beats print... but usually I never get to even see the client, and account 
handlers are not interested in techno babble...
Another point to note is that when the stuff you are making is ephemeral in nature 
there is less of a requirement to make it perfect... if it is 6:45 on a friday and 
this microsite needs an adjustment you can do in 6 seconds with a hack, and the site 
is only gonna be there for 2 weeks...
I'm not saying all hacks are good or anything, just that there is a time and place 
for everything. Take the @import 'hack', a valid way of hiding complex CSS from a 
browser that will choke on it, which allows me to actually use css because if I can't 
hide my css from certain browsers then I have to limit my css to what they understand 
or else my documents might not be usable
I just think it is a little simplistic and idealistic to tell newcomers to css that all hacks are bad. 

s
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