- The clickable image map with pixel-perfect precision is a marvel of efficiency and have probably necessitated a lot of tedious, manual labor. Or a nice dive into a library of country maps and a script to tie it all together.
- Most of the content is static HTML, probably updated by hand from time to time. Could this be the reason why the website is surviving the slashdot/HN effect?
- It seems that there are a lot of Estonians (or Estoniaphiles) on Hacker News
> The clickable image map with pixel-perfect precision is a marvel of efficiency and have probably necessitated a lot of tedious, manual labor.
I remember reading about image maps back when everyone still thought XHTML was going to be it, and really wanting to use them because they seemed to be so underused yet secretly quit powerful. But they're such a pain.
Imagine if someone made an easy GUI tool for that. Just load an image, overlay some vector shapes, associate shapes with links, spit out either a static site, or plain HTML tags to embed elsewhere.
EDIT: Via the MDN tutorial on image maps[0], I found this[1]. Interesting to see old website tech like that.
> Imagine if someone made an easy GUI tool for that. Just load an image, overlay some vector shapes, associate shapes with links, spit out either a static site, or plain HTML tags to embed elsewhere.
This is an amazing idea! That way, any person with the software could create a website that would work well. It could obsolesce the notion of hand-crafted XHTML entirely!
A system where What You See Is What You Get for the web would be incredible.
Is it perhaps possible that not only are you not the first to think of such, but that such systems have been created and commercialized?
I think that amount of snark is a bit uncalled for.
What you're talking about are kitchen-sink tools, and IIRC the produced output was usually a bloated swamp of tags and classes.
I meant a simple tool that does one thing and one thing only.
Image maps are pretty easy, conceptually. The <map> tag is a list of <areas>, anchored to an image. An <area> is an <a> tag with "shape" and "coords" added to it. The former indicating which of the four different shapes of shapes the area is (circle, rect, poly, and default, which is the whole page minus any other hotspots that are defined), the latter being a list of nrs.
A GUI app for that would just need:
- a way to open an image
- circle, rect and poly drawing primitives to create a new area
- the ability to select drawn areas and fill in the required href and alt fields - the ability to change, reorder, copy and delete created areas
That's something barely above the metal of the underlying tags - it wouldn't add any bloat. It could even be done as a web-app, or a plug-in for your favourite code editor.
And it's not nearly as elaborate or complicated as the tools you are talking about.
>Most of the content is static HTML, probably updated by hand from time to time. Could this be the reason why the website is surviving the slashdot/HN effect?
Probably not, because it doesn't survive the slashdot effect. Many of the places I clicked didn't work.
Yes, if I am interested in European history, and after reading the novels of Sofi Oksanen, I feel as if the past is illuminated by the stories like Estonia's. It is hard for me to truly understand the massive shift in 'way of life' and worldview that occured in the early 1900s. The death of the aristocratic, monarchical, peasant-and-master way of life, which these manors represented, transformed within a few decades to the idea that more democratic style of life was normal and everyone should have it. Watching the crumbled manors is a literal embodiment of a shift in human consciousness, where the way things were for hundreds of years suddenly ceased to exist and simply rotted away. Estonians were essentially ruled by a German overclass, and its history is intertwined the Nazi history and it's obsession with restoring the "old ways". What do we have now that is considered normal that will fall away in 500 years? or 50? Will people say 'such and such building represented the old society, where poor people were not allowed to go to the doctor'
This is untrue. You need insurance to visit a doctor. You have insurance if somebody pays your "social tax." This means that you must be employed or be a child, in education, or a pensioner.
If you're unemployed and don't qualify for the unemployment program (many don't) then you don't have health insurance and have to pay out of pocket for all doctor's visits. The same applies if you are self-employed and your social tax cut isn't high enough.
Many of the people who would need it the most don't have access to healthcare in Estonia. They have access to emergency care though, but that's the same in the US.
How strict is the unemployment program? Over there in Lithuania, as long as you go to your appointments at the local job office (= you're not working in UK or Norway), it's really hard to get removed from the list.
You have to keep your monthly appointments and keep to their "job searching plan." This can mean that you must take part in some group events and apply for jobs based on a schedule. And if they can find a job then you can't always turn it down. Some people have said that the dealing with unemployment is almost like working a job.
To register for unemployment (benefits) you must have worked for at least 180 days in the last year. Education is included in work. So if you didn't do that then you're out of luck.
- The clickable image map with pixel-perfect precision is a marvel of efficiency and have probably necessitated a lot of tedious, manual labor. Or a nice dive into a library of country maps and a script to tie it all together.
- Most of the content is static HTML, probably updated by hand from time to time. Could this be the reason why the website is surviving the slashdot/HN effect?
- It seems that there are a lot of Estonians (or Estoniaphiles) on Hacker News