« Reading List: Stretch: The World of Panoramic Photography | Main | Reading List: The Plot Against America »

Thursday, November 30, 2006

New Serial Feature: Lignières: Then and Now

Comparing images, some taken more than a century ago, of Fourmilab's home in Switzerland with contemporary photos from the same viewpoints provides a transtemporal perspective on the evolution of a rural village in Western Switzerland. You can start with the introduction to the project, embark upon a walking tour of the village, or pick a viewpoint from the graphical index based on a map of the village. Those interested in undertaking such a project themselves may wish to read the tips on the craft of “then and now” photography gleaned during the production of these pages.

This project was launched today as a new Fourmilab serial feature, in conjunction with the publication on December 14th of the Lignières history book for which these historical images were collected. A new “then and now” image will be posted every Friday until all are available on-line. Bookmark this week's image to view new images as they are released.

This entire document tree is produced in XHTML 1.0 using the “Strict” Document Type Definition. It demonstrates that even within that strait-laced dialect, it is nonetheless possible to implement hovering thumbnail images, targeted links, and pages which gracefully degrade when JavaScript is absent or disabled. If your pages have been afflicted by the floating link bug in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, which causes a link floated to the right or left of text which happens to be set in italics not to function, take a look at the <table> based document footer in these pages. While it's less elegant than a pure CSS solution, it has the merit of dodging the flaw in the legacy foolscap browser, while continuing to work correctly in its competently-implemented competition and maintaining strict compliance with XHTML 1.0.

Posted at November 30, 2006 23:25