Homemade Parachute
Another Fine Homemade Parachute Page, Crafted With Love
Web Site
2001 - present
The online playground. Where it begins, and where it’ll end. For a while, a complete sell-out, what with the fancy-pants Flash interface and all. Now, pulled back from the edge, and rendered in clean, lite, sweet-tasting XHTML. Still, I tried to make this as unusual an experience as I could, and use Flash to foil all your attempts at easy navigation. Even went as far, in a moment of insanity, of building a JavaScript version of the Flash interface, just because. Always changing, with new stuff added less often than I’d like, but more often than I’d thought possible. Considering.
Version 1, first launched on homepage.mac.com in glorious ’01. Pretty rough HTML, with loads of image maps and rendered text. Yikes.
Why have multiple pages when you could just scroll one big one? Monster took that to the extreme: a 6000 pixel square poster, viewable one small viewport at a time. But once it loaded, it was pretty speedy.
A special treat to capitalize on the “sex” craze making its way around the web in ’02, Naked was a look behind the gradients for those of prurient interest.
Everyone was doing Flash in ’03, so why not us? Because we sucked at it, that’s why. But if you’re going to use Flash, it should at least be interesting, and this game board asked you to roll the dice to navigate. Because aren’t all portfolios pretty much a gamble?
After getting the standards bug from Zeldman, the 2003 edition was the first to validate as XHTML 1.1 Strict, quite an accomplishment in those heady days. Style sheet switchers were also the rage, but as with Flash, not so interestingly, so we used one that didn’t just change the look, it changed the content. Because winter is a cruel and desolate place....
