Topic awaiting preservation: is there a program to take a big image and make into....

Hello,

I am not sure what this is called, but I was wondering if there is a program that I could use to take a large full-screen photo and automatically chop it up into square segments and create a table in html so that the image will appear on the screen as it should. ??

Kinda like what they typically do on porno sites - but my picture is clean..

what is this process referred to?

The next question is if there is a way to treat this similar to a background image and have a page of text floating on top?? I guess that would probably be a javascript or CSS question??

thanks much

Eric001

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well - I guess nevermind the first part of the question. I should have done a search on the web first. There is a freeware program at thecastle.com that does what I was looking for.

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Get rid of those stupid, inaproapriate and bloated table based layout. XHTML + CSS are the way to go. Put your image in the background of a DIV or of the BODY and bam!



(Edited by poi on 12-20-2004 14:55)

afaik imageready does that too.

just slice it up and export to html.

Eric001,

As GRUMBLE pointed out, you can cut the image up using ImageReady. ImageReady will also produce a table or the CSS needed to display the image.

As poi siad, you should really be using CSS to do this, particularly if you want to have other things like text on top of the image.

ImageReady will give you a lot of smaller images and an *.html file that will display the image. If you wrap all the <div>s created by ImageReady in another <div>, you can treat thie sliced image as a single object and move it around the screen, give it a z-index, etc. I don't remeber for sure, but you may need to change all the <div>s generated by ImageReady to have { position: relative } so that their position will be controlled by the wrapper <div>

Try it, you'll like it!



.

-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

the CSS and DIV method sounds interesting. But will that work with all the usual browsers?

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yes.

Of course. There's nothing more basic than that, and this is the method recomended by the W3C.

It's quite interesting.... there seems to be a perception that CSS and XHTML are somehow "unstable," while tables and tag soup are the "safe" or "reliable" way to go. A few years ago, before all major browsers incorporated support for CSS, that might have been true. But CSS-based design has been reliable for so long now that I am always amazed every time I see someone asking if it will "work with all the usual browsers," as if CSS-based design is some sort of untested, experimental house of cards that might collapse at any moment.

I'm not trying to put you down, Eric, I just am truly surprised whenever I hear these doubts expressed. Yes, there are still some things in CSS that are incredibly frustrating, and there are some browser "quirks" (or "bugs," if you want to call it like it is) that can make you pull your hair out, but the basics are solid. Much more solid than table-based layout. Rest assured that your CSS-based designs will not only be accessible, they will also be more efficient and effective.

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

I don't know, why one can't simply use a hybred system. The minimal table for layout and css for content formating. The seam to me the best of both methods.

Why not use tables with css? Just do so wisely. I never understood this all or nothing approach.

On my work in progress, I had major issues with the float bug on IE 5 mac, and I can't seem to find any simple/useable works arounds. Everything worked perfect on IE 6, Firefox, and would validate, but it no go on IE 5 Mac. I just to many issues for my older mac users.

What do others think about this approach?

If it was my personal site I guess wouldn't care about IE 5 Mac or simply design it to cascade. But it's a comercial site, design driven, and after all "What the client want the client gets...", Not that I didn't try hard to convince them otherwise, but to them the appearance of the site was more important.

J. Stuart J.

quote:

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jstuartj said:

Why not use tables with css? Just do so wisely. I never understood this all or
nothing approach.

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Tables were never meant to be layout tools. There were used as such because there was nothing better at the time. Now there is something better. Why continue to use an inferior tool when there is a better one out there?

Perhaps you've heard this rhetoric before, and you are not convinced. It is not simply about ideals and philosophy and rhetoric, though. There are practical advantages to using CSS-based design over table-based design. Rather than repeating what others more knowledgeable than myself have said far better than I ever could, here are a couple of ALA articles you might find informative:

A List Apart's journey from table hacks to css layout
CSS talking points

I try not to be a CSS zealot, running around and burning people at the stake. It's hard--I mean, burning people at the stake is a lot of fun. Seriously, though, what I was commenting on above was the idea that somehow table-based design is more stable than CSS-based design. It's not. Table-based design is a hack, a hideous, inefficient hack. It is unfortunate that we have been using this hack for so long that we somehow think it's the right way to do things.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"

quote:

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Why not use tables with css? Just do so wisely. I never understood this all or nothing approach.

---

By all means - use tables. And pleas, if you do - use CSS to style them...they can be pretty ugly otherwise.

But use them for what they were meant for, and not for laying out your page.

CSS is to be used no matter what your HTML is. It is seperate from your structure - in fact that's its whole point.

It's not about "all or nothing", it's about using the proper tags for the proper purpose, with the intention of creating more portable, more well structured, and more stable code (and thus more portable, more well structured, and more stable webpages as well).





(Edited by DL-44 on 01-13-2005 13:55)

CSS can be difficult to understand when you first start to try to get pages to look the same in several different browsers. Trying to get a page to look the way you want it to can be so frustrating that it is often tempting to go back to using tables for controlling layout. However, once you have started to controll the layout of pages using CSS and gain an understanding of what is going on, you will gain a speed in development that you never had using tables. Your code will be cleaner, easier to understand, and pages will load faster.

i have converted a couple of sites that used tables for layout to css and have seen dramatic increase in performance. Pages that were taking thirty seconds to a minute to download and render are being displayed in ten seconds or less.

Once you have gained those kinds of advantages, why would you want to go back to using tables?

Work up to it gradually. Try to use css when you can and keep using it more and more. After a while you will find that you're using it all the time and only using tables for including tabular data in the page.



.

-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

Thanks for the feed back, oh I'm convinced but the boss/client is not and I just didn't have time to fight with it.

My own site is going well with an all css design, but ofcource have more control over the design and appearance, and was able to take ccs issues into consideration in the design.

I will start another thread, so as not to hijack this one farther. One I get time to code an example of my problem. Perhap someone here can solve it. As I have had no luck finding a good solution after hours of trying, and researching the web for similar issues.

J. Stuart

(Edited by jstuartj on 01-13-2005 20:48)

OK -

The funny thing is that I have abandoned my original quest in favor of just leaving the image whole and accessable to anyone who wants it. But in response to your pitch, I have done some looking around at CSS. I am slowly moving in that direction, but I am probably going to stay in the hybrid realm for a while....

In any case, in doing my research, I started looking for a wysiwyg css program and ran across Topstyle Pro. What is your opinion of that program? It looks like something I should learn.

(I am beginning to think that this thread belongs in the css forum)

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I'm thinking maybe just start up a new thread in the CSS forum...

jstuartj: The "CSS talking points" article I linked to above was written specifically for designers who need to convince recalcitrant bosses/clients of the benefits of standards-compliant coding.

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup | "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!"