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Housing as it does many of the icons of modern art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City sports a website commensurate with its stature.
The "splash page" has a rotating MOMA icon on a black background. Which would usually disqualify any site from the get-go. But remember where we are. MOMA is forgiven.
Once inside the body of the site, however, we are confronted with a cool gray background and links in image format. No fat graphics here, however. All the images, including those of the interior of the Museum, are reduced to a bare minimum consistent with maintaining quality.
Navigation is a snap due to the descriptive nature of the links within the site. And a tastefully rendered "MENU" logolink takes one back to the coolly-elegant home.
The site was constructed by what seems to be a cast of thousands. It has quite deservedly won a list of awards as long as one's arm.
For a first-rate example of subtly forceful site design and architecture, visit this site.
Better yet, visit the Museum itself...
We all had copies of the book "Games People Play" by Eric Berne MD in the '60's and '70's. It analyzed human interaction in terms of three ego states - Adult, Parent and Child.
It seems to us, a lot of the time, that many site owners are stuck in the Child ego state when it comes to Web business - "Gimme, gimme, gimme!".
We have long believed that doing business on the Web is about incremental transactions. Gerry McGovern (of Nua Ltd), for example, writes a regular newsletter. We find his views by turns infuriating, aggravating, thought-provoking and eminently sensible.
The point being that Gerry, no matter what he says, offers us value in the form of food for thought.
At some point in the future, we would expect him to ask his large and loyal readership for something - a referral, for example. This we would expect - it's the nature of the transaction.
The Web is an excellent medium for facilitating this type of long-term, incremental, transactional relationship.
It's astonishing to us how many site operators simply don't understand this.
The symbol TM is pretty well unversally recognized as denoting a registered trademark.
But perhaps no more.
That well-known centre of planetary Internet activity and innovation, the Republic of Turkmenistan, has claimed the suffix ".TM" for domain names lodged in its national registry.
The registry is operated by household name NetNames, the celebrated "global domain name registry".
Turkmenistan is the latest outpost of digital culture to swell its coffers (and presumably, the coffers of their registration organizations) by offering domain names for the standard $50/year. (Others include:
Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with anyone anywhere offering weird and woderful domain name suffixes to anyone who wants them.
However, it does tend to make things more than a trifle confusing, and serves to point up the total lack of imagination and leadership current in the doamin name quagmire.
The Internet was never inhtended to carry the amount of traffic it currently does - and will increasingly. The DNS was never designed to carry the proliferation of organizations it does.
As we have pointed out in the past, the DNS is in need of a fundamental rethink.
NetNames and their Central Asian chums are merely compounding a confused and confusing situation.
Oh yes - we tried to register "pepsi.tm". The Turks were having nothing of it. They told us that:
HTML is in a constant state of flux, with new browser-specific tags being devised with each reiteration of the two major browsers.
In general, it's a hassle keeping up with them all.
No more. The latest version of Ron Woodall's excellent HTML Compendium has just been posted (dated February 1, 1998).
This resource lists pretty much every tag ever devised and provides indicators of which versions of which browsers support it.
The site itself is well-designed, offering the user a variety of mirrors depending on their geographical location, and, more importantly, a choice of framed or non-framed versions.
Bookmark this site and return regularly for updates!
Take a look at the Archives. We've indexed all the past issues with topic pointers.
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