Group 2: Janus Texts
Oh... I'm in that group. Never mind. Caffeine obviously isn't
finished yet. Palimpsest just needs some cosmetic changes. All the pages
that just say "Main Page" will have actual content sometime next week...
Is there a Netscape and telnet-enabled lab that has both Macs and
PCs, so I can fix the colors for the Mac-ers?
Group 3: Dreams
Hmm.. another head with exposed brain parts...
Just a pet peeve of mine, but backgrounds that don't match up to
themselves on opposite sides (e.g. lay4a/fabric2.gif) really annoy my
eyeballs. It makes a visual edge where there shouldn't be one, and it makes
it look like the vertical hold on my browser is broken.
Most of the backgrounds, while they may be dreamy, make the text
difficult to read because they either have close to the same color of the
text, or they pull the eye in a different direction than the left-to-right
direction of text flow.
The famous person quotes at the ends of Laura's pages is a nice
touch. They establish some external context alongside the dream anecdotes,
which reaffirms my reasons to read the page. Same thing happening with
lay4a/define.html... Alternating between concrete example and abstract
meaning. I like. Perhaps there could be more of this in the other dream groups.
Group 4: does not exist. Next...
Group 5: Cathedral
First, a CGI bug report:
In the page generated by /~ensp482/ant7y/pickone.cgi?animal/4/
which reads:
The animal always comes on the eve of some national
tragedy or the eve of the changing of an administration.
This particular night was just before a plane crash
in which hundreds of Amercians were killed.
(etc)
the picture erroneously href'd to /~ensp482.ant7y/pickone.cgi?business/1/
.ant7y should be /ant7y
Next, some critique...
I like the visual aspect of this work. The cathedral
photos/gargoyles/etc lend a lot to the stories. The visuals are especially
effective when the edges of the objects in the photo blend into the
background (e.g. the "places" path) without obvious cropping borders. The
also keep a consistent visual theme going throughout the duration of each
path. This gives the reader a visual clue when the path changes, which is
generally a good interface design principle.
The stories are engaging by themselves, but you've also done a good
job with the presentation. One discrepancy that I noticed from the Rules of
the Game page is that you imply that readers have some choice or power over
the direction of their path, when they are really just riding a randomized
roller coaster. Except for the "rules" page and the intro "two doors" page,
I didn't find a single node in the cathedral that had more than one link to
another page. The path through the cathedral has no forks. Aside from the
center statue, the two doors on the introductory imagemap seem to be just a
big hoax.
(I really do like the project, I just needed to nitpick something)
later
nater