Eschewing skeuomorphism
What's better than that hideous leatherette calendar?
In the publishing track at XML Summer School, Jo Rabin gave an excellent overview of the challenges of publishing to mobile devices.
Along the way, we took a brief detour through skeuomorphism (no, I don't remember the connection to mobile devices). One of the threads of discussion was about how skeuomorphism limits design. Talking about the awful leatherette look of the Mac 10.8 version of iCal, got me thinking about my display of calendars. I paint them on the desktop:
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It's an overstatement to say those are skeuomorphic, I suppose, but design-wise they're certainly fairly straight forward copies of a traditional paginated calendar.
Tonight, I was thinking about what might be done outside the constraints of the printed page. Here's my first attempt:
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The current date is always in the sixth week displayed, the calendar “slides past” in some figurative sense.
I don't know if it's really better, but I'll live with it for a bit. In any event, it was amusing to craft the XQuery, HTML, and CSS necessary to display it without tables.
Comments
Why would you want to display it without tables? Calendars are tabular data; semantically it's a little weak, but they've been traditionally represented as tables for so long that it kinda sticks.
>What's better than that hideous leatherette calendar?
A warm leatherette calendar? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn4ohXUdo_8
There's no semantic reason to avoid them, I guess. I sometimes find the added complication of the interaction between tables and CSS rules a bit annoying. Getting the row and column dividers seemed like it would easier with just divs, plus it was a chance for me to experiment with horizontally aligned divs.
Well played, Bob. :-)