Selected Courses on Digital Art-UOWM

9 Απριλίου 2013

for the HSPACE

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 10:50

Impure Opticality or: When Urban Screens Were Architecture

Shibuya at Night (Source) 

We normally think of urban screens as those larger (and brighter) than life media displays that illuminate cities and public spaces throughout the world.  In places like Shibuya or Times Square, for example, building façades have become the sites for what Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer call the “spectacular exhaustion of urban space.” [1]  The term serves a double purpose.  On the one hand, it does allude, albeit subtly, to the idea of how media screens become sources of light pollution.  The suggestion is that urban screens, with their barrage of lights,  exhaust and confuse the urban dweller to the point of sensorial exhaustion.  On the other hand, the term operates as a nod toGuy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) as well as to Paul Virilio’s idea of architecture as “media building”[2]—the latter being a term describing how architecture has transformed from a practice of creating structures of habitation to designing vehicles of information.  Such language immediately invokes buildings like Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque (2001).  Ito’s statement that his building—a Maison Dom-i-no for the information age integrating “the primitive body of natural flow and the virtual body of electronic flow”—really does invoke architecture as the literal building of media.

Historical analyses are useful in detecting the social, cultural, and technological milieus that led to the deployment of urban screens.  However, what kind of history are we (or should we be) talking about?  In his contribution to the Urban Screens Reader (2009), Erkki Huhtamo outlines an “archaeology of public media displays”—an ostensibly foucauldian approach that looks at past practices in order to understand the present. He links contemporary urban screen practice to the development of “trade signs, banners and broadsides to billboards and the earliest dynamic displays”[3] of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Huhtamo’s essay asserts that urban screen practice is first and formost urban—and from this we can infer that urban screens are therefore coextensive with the development of modern urbanism.  Such an assumption would normally cause us to deploy our favorite quotes and aphorisms by Walter BenjaminGeorg Simmel, or Siegfried Kracauer in support of Huhtamo’s observations at a moment’s notice.  And yet somehow the history of architecture remains a muted presence.

Urban screens are architectural in two senses of the word.  Urban screens generally stand perpendicular to the ground plane, a characteristic that places them in the same architectural categories as walls or facades.  Yet urban screens also operate as a kind of architectural effect.  They transform facades and curtain walls from blank or ornamented surfaces into actively charged envelopes.  And this transformation has been the object of recent criticism.  In an essay on the mediatic function of postwar American architecture, for example, Reinhold Martin makes a deceptively simple equation between curtain walls and television screens.  At the heart of this equivalency is a well-placed quote from Samuel Weber:

[T]he television screen can be said to live up to its name in at least three distinct, contradictory and yet interrelated senses.  First, it serves as a screen which allows distant vision [tele-vision] to be watched. Second, it screens, in the sense of selecting or filtering, the vision that is watched. And finally, it serves as a screen in the sense of standing between the viewer and the viewed, since what is rendered visible covers the separation that distinguished the other vision [the seeing someone or something seeing] from that of the sight of the spectator sitting in front of the set.[4]

The same could be said, for the most part, about urban screens.  Architectural effects, of course, have their own history, and Weber’s framework can provide a solid foundation from which to understand this development.  To modify this statement and apply it to urban screens as architecture requires some elaboration.  The first two definitions of screen—of screen as a mediator of distant vision and as a kind of selective filter—certainly do apply to urban screens.  Urban screens can depict scenes from faraway or physically distinct locales much in the same way as a television screen.  The third definition, however, is a variant of the first.  We can think of it as a way of distinguishing the sight of the viewer from the source of the image on the urban screen.  It is an impure opticality (to modify Clement Greenberg’s term)—an opticality that relies on the flatness of the urban screen (or just the condition of flatness) for its ability to project and transmit images.  The idea of an impure opticality recognizes the urban screen as a hybrid site that can include and display various kinds of media at different times.

Fritz Lang, Photograph of Broadway (1924) (Republished in Mendelsohn’s Amerika) (Source)

What, then, are architectural examples of screens that exemplify this notion of impure opticality?  An attempt at an exhaustive catalog of examples remains far beyond the purpose of this post.  Whole books have and remain to be written on the subject.  But for our purposes here, we can begin with a picture (and accompanying passage) from Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (1926).  The book includes photographs of buildings that Mendelsohn took while on a visit to the United States in 1924 at the behest of his publisher, Rudolf Mosse.  At one point, Mendelsohn reproduces a picture by Fritz Lang (who accompanied him on the trip) of a series of billboards along Broadway in Manhattan.  Here, lighted Coca-Cola and Dairylea billboards leave incandescent traces across the celluloid.  It as if Lang were momentarily disoriented, moving too rapidly, avoiding the onslaught of artificial light while keeping the camera aperture open. This light inscribes everything as a double-image, anticipating the scene in Metropolis when the technocrat Johann Fredersen stares outside his own office at the frenzied city lights flickering faster and faster: a vision of a city in disrepair.  And in his caption to the photograph, Mendelsohn writes:

Uncanny. The contours of the building are erased.

But in one’s consciousness they still rise, chase one another, trample one another.

This is the foil for the flaming scripts, the rocket fire of moving illuminating ads, emerging and submerging, disappearing and breaking out again over the thousands of autos and the maelstrom of pleasureseeking people.

Still disordered, because exaggerated, but all the same full of imaginative beauty, which will one day be complete.[5]

Lang’s photograph and Mendelsohn’s caption are a useful starting point for our investigation of urban screens for two reasons.  First, notice how the photograph elides any distinction between building and media.  This arresting image owes as much to its exposure as it does to the phantom traces captured on film.  But it is also important to note just how critical Mendelsohn is of the resulting image.  The casting of lights onto urban space is “beautiful” yet “disordered.”  Like the attendant image, his observations collapse any difference between building and billboard—we get the sense that he directs his ire as much to the billboard as to the underlying architecture, and yet it is difficult to maintain any difference between the two.

Erik Gunnar Asplund, Advertising Mast (1930) (Source)

We can think of Lang’s photograph as one of the first architectural conceptualizations of urban screens because of its equation of light effects with buildings.  Although this was precisely the point of Mendelsohn’s invective, other architects took advantage of this equivalency.   Only a couple of years later, Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885-1940) drew an elevation for an advertising mast for the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930.  The drawing reveals only the most minimal of architectural interventions—a neo-Constructivist fantasy of sorts.  A giant, metal frame, carried aloft above grade, acts a mast supporting a small observation platform between clew and tack.  Steel battens extend outward, each holding a thin cable suggesting the existence of a sail.  Between head and clew, and somewhere along the leech, nautical banners flutter in the wind.  Along the luff, illuminated signs bearing the names and logos of various companies are stacked upon each other.  Asplund’s mast acted like a beacon, casting its incandescent information into the air.  The Swedish novelist Ivar Lo-Johansson even remarked how “the high steel mast on the exhibition grounds projected like a signal, like a thrilling expression of joy, toward the bright blue sky.  The era of functionalism had blown in.”[6]

C.G. Rosenberg, Photograph of Asplund’s Advertising Mast (1930) (Signage by Sigurd Lewerentz)

One of the most compelling and dramatic images of Asplund’s advertising mast was taken from ground level by photographer C.G. Rosenberg.  The camera, trained upwards, reveals the aforementioned stacking of corporate logos (designed by fellow Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz).  Here, unlike in Lang’s photograph, the logos never dominate or overpower the image.  Lewerentz’s signs occupy only the top half of the image.  They almost totally obscure the mast.  The observation platform dominates the bottom half of the image.  This trick of angle does more than just compress the entirety of the advertisement mast into a single frame—it equates the relative flatness of the corporate logos with the flat, smooth, white surfaces of the observation deck.  And yet, the building in the picture, though white and supported in the air, nevertheless appears heavy and overbearing.  Here, through careful composition, architectural modernism literally and figuratively supports the projection of images into public space.  Architecture becomes the foundation for the broadcasting of media.

Venturi, Rauch, Scott Brown, National College Football Hall of Fame (1967)

Fast forward another 40 years or so, and we finally get to Robert Venturi’s and Denise Scott Brown’s famous dictum fromLearning From Las Vegas that “billboards are almost all right.”  Their tongue-in-cheek appraisal of architecture’s communicative potential is more than just a vindication of building as a form of visual art: it is an affirmation of “the validity of the commercial vernacular.”[7]  And just before their legendary Las Vegas studio, Venturi and Scott Brown had already explored the limits of commercial vernacular to the fullest extent possible.  Their unrealized National College Football Hall of Fame (1967) in New Brunswick, New Jersey is as close as one can get to the architecturalization of a billboard.  They called it a combination of sign and building, or “bill-ding-board”—a nod to the project’s dominating billboard facade.  Venturi’s description of the project in the April 1968 issue of Architectural Forum is especially resonant for those interested in urban screens:

The building fronts on large parking spaces and Rutgers Stadium and backs onto an exhibition field.  The billboard is 100′ x 200′.  Buttresses integrate it with the rest of the building.  Interior display niches fall within the buttress, static spaces along a long gallery.  This billboard, itself several feet thick, is backed by a maintenance catwalk, interlaced with the buttresses.  The screen, the approximate proportions of a football field, is lit by 200,000 electronically programmed lights which produce moving sequences of naturalistic images, or words and diagrams of football plays.  Immediately below the screen, where seats are bad in a movie, is a moat.[8]

What differentiates this project from Lang’s photograph or Asplund’s mast is an emphasis on entertainment.  Venturi’s description affirms the building’s role as a provider of images for public consumption.  More specifically, however, the National College Football Hall of Fame is an important predecessor for urban screens not only because of its architectural qualities, but also for its use of a literal screen as a means to display a combination of images and data—a first stab at an architecture for the sake of impure opticality.

Urban Apartment Block, from Playtime (dir. Jacques Tati, 1967)

More needs to be said about Weber’s quote, and especially about the relevance of television screens to an examination of urban screens.  If there is a building that truly exemplifies the relationship between television screen, curtain wall, and architecture, it would be the modernist apartment block from Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967).  A medium shot captures the bottom two stories of a glazed building.  Four large picture windows, roughly the same proportion as television screens, reveal four families watching television sets inside their apartments.  Except for a few lamps, the television glow lights each unit from within.  The effect of course being that each unit now resembles a television set.  Here, spectator and spectacle, observer and observed are conflated onto the building’s window wall: “the generic window-wall becomes a metaphor for the movie screen itself, its extruded architectural technology multiplying it ad infinitum.”[9]


Top
: Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie Scott and Co. Department Store (1899-1904); Bottom: Le Corbusier, Maison Clarté (1930-32) (Source: Sigfried Giedion, 
Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Fifth Revised and Enlarged Edition [Cmabridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008 (1966)]).

Jenney’s Leiter Building vs. Le Corbusier’s Maison Clarté, from Giedion, 
Raum, Zeit, Architektur: Die Entstehung einer neuen Tradition(Berlin: Springer, 2000 [1960]).

Tati’s careful framing recalls similar photographs of building facades from Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941).  In that book, Giedion looks to photographs of windows and skeletal frames of buildings such asWilliam Le Baron Jenney’s Fair Building (1891) and Leiter Building (1889), as well as Louis Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company department store (1899-1904) as buildings where “what is expressed in its construction and its architecture” are equal.[10]  The demarcator between the various structural/architectural elements are the horizontally-elongated “Chicago windows” that give these buildings their glazed appearance.  And in one famous instance, Giedion utilizes a Wölfflinian approach and pairs Jenney’s Leiter building on one page against Le Corbusier’s Maison Clarté (1930-32) on the other.  Although Giedion uses these images to show how these two architects used skeletal frames to achieve a kind of architectural purity, again it is the difference in glazing that deserves attention.  Whereas the windows are cut deeply into the Leiter building’s facade, in the Maison Claré, window and structural unit seem to become part of the same surface. This too is a compositional trick.  With careful cropping and the use of a telephoto lens, the terraces and walkways are flattened onto a single image.

In Playtime, the apartment building also reveals a decided Chicago Frame influence.  The dark, horizontal floor plates, when played against the lighted vertical framing, suggest that the windows are also cut deeply into the facade.  And yet the ambient television glow from within problematizes this distinction.  A second glance reveals that the glass planes are indeed flush with the surface facade.  And as in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1957), external wide-flange vertical beams are deployed as subtle ornament.

Eiffel Tower reflected onto Tativille glazing, from Playtime (1967)

This collapsing of window onto facade becomes yet another way to erase any distinction between building and image.  And this is even more so in Tati’s film, where glazed curtain walls reflect other parts of Paris.  Here, then, glass becomes architecture.  Architecture becomes a screen that reflects images onto public space.  In short, as demonstrated by the various buildings (and reflections of buildings) in Playtime, architecture has become a true urban screen.

Let us return back to Weber’s definition of “screen”.  Specifically, the second definition—that of a screen as a filtering device—becomes important because is alludes to how an urban screen may be deployed in front of a building.  The urban screen becomes a site of impure opticality, a surface where various kinds of images, colors, and information, illuminate city spaces.  And yet, once we move beyond Huhtamo’s archaeological investigations, we note that urban screens filter and obscure much more than the supporting architecture: they conceal histories of architectures that gave rise to this phenomenon in the first place.

______________________

Notes


[1] Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer, Introduction to Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), p. 10.

[2] Gianni Ranauldo, Light Architecture, New Edge City (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001), p. 7.
[3] Erkki Huhtamo, “Messages on the Wall: An Archaeology of Public Media Displays” in Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer, Introduction to Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), p. 15.
[4] Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Alan Cholodenko, ed. Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), quoted in Reinhold Martin, “Atrocities.  Or, Curtain Wall as Mass Medium” Perspecta, Vol. 32, Resurfacing Modernism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001), p. 70.
[5] Stanley Appelbaum, trans., Erich Mendelsohn’s “Amerika”: 82 Photographs (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), p. 52.  The original caption reads:

Unheimlich. Die Konturen der Häuser sind aus gewischt. Aber in Bewußtsein steigen sie noch, laufen einander nach, überennen sich.

Das ist die Folie für die Flammenschriften, das Raketenfeuer der beweglichen Lichtreklame, auf- und untertauchend, verschwindend und ausbrechend über den Tausenden von Autos und dem Lustwirbel der Menschen.

Noch ungeordnet, weil übersteigert, aber doch schon voll von phantastischer Schönheit, die einmal vollendet sein wird.

Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Berlin: Rudolf Mosse Verlag, 1928), p. 130.  For more information, see Enrique Ramirez, “Erich Mendelsohn at War” Perspecta, Vol. 41, Grand Tour (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008).
[6] Ivar Lo-Johansson, The Author (1957), quoted in Dag Windman, Karin Winter, and Nina Stritzler-Levine, Bruno Mathsson: Architect and Designer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 14.
[7] Rober Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977 [1972]), p. 6.
[8] Venturi, “A Bill-Ding Board Involving Movies, Relics and Space,” Architectural Forum (Apr., 1968) pp. 74-76.
[9] Joan Ockman, “Architecture in a Mode of Distraction: Eight Takes on Jacques Tati’s Playtime,” in Mark Lamster, ed. Architecture and Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), p. 189.
[10] Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967 [1941]), p. 385.

HMNY.ORG CALL FOR PAPERS 2013

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 10:48

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 10:20

Evangelina Guerra Luján ( a.k.a. The Nomad) is an urban architect, public space designer/strategist, spatial designer and lecturer/pedagogue.Trained in Urban Architecture at ITESM (Guadalajara, México) with a postgraduate degree in Design, Art and Society: Actions on Public Space at ELISAVA (Barcelona, Spain) and a Master Advanced Studies of Applied Sciences in Spatial Design (ehem. Scenography) at ZHdK (Zürich, Switzerland), Evangelina develops her professional practice beyond the traditional boundaries of Architecture.

Cartographer interested in the new territory of social network, she created in 2010 the platform “The Nomad / THNMD”: a tool for research, communicate and disseminate knowledge in the fields of Urbanism, Architecture, Design and Art, with an activist and political approach.

Evangelina is founder and Director of OTUN : Oficina de Transformación Urbana | Nómada: a young architectural practice/research platform combining Urbanism, Public Space Design and Spatial Intervention. OTUN develops and investigates strategies for urban renewal.

She is faculty member of ITESM University at both Architecture and Design Departments.
Her work has been published in various printed and on-line media such as Arquine MagazineSocks Studio and Quaderns.

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 10:07
https://sites.google.com/site/2013hmny/cfp

HMNYC 2013: Confronting Capital
April 26-28, 2013

New York University

Critical investigations into the present moment quickly reveal that the current crisis of capitalism shows no sign of abating. The failure of austerity to restore growth has sent ruling class politicians scrambling, as the assault of capital on all fronts of life—ecological, economic and social—grows exponentially. 
    
This is not without resistance however. From the ongoing Arab revolution, to Occupy and Greece, confrontations of capital and regimes of power continue to proliferate, push forth new political horizons and sustain influence on a global scale. 

HMNY 2013 is an intervention into the present to provide a theoretical space for debate and discussion, urgently needed on the left at this juncture. Moments like this are especially fertile for new looks at old debates, from the history of capitalism to new modes of resistance. HMNY 2013 will be a venue where figures representing the breadth of current leftist thought will convene to exchange ideas.

Historical Materialism (HM) is one the foremost journals of Marxian theory. HM’s London-based conferences have long drawn hundreds of scholars from around the world. Since 2006, North American HM conferences have been organized in Toronto and New York City (which will now alternate with bi-annual Spring conferences). HMNY 2013 will begin with a reception on the evening of Friday April 26th, and will take place on April 27th-28th at the New York University in downtown Manhattan. All participants are encouraged to stay for the whole duration of the conference.
The themes for this year’s conference will include:
  • politics of socialist planning and utopias
  • history and future of social democracy
  • political economy of capitalism
  • history of international communism
  • political philosophy of feminism
  • debt, austerity, and finance
  • critical geographies
  • ecology and climate change
  • law, punishment, and incarceration
  • queer studies and sexuality
  • theories of the state and politics
  • race and capital
  • empire and the third world
  • history of capital and labor
  • feminism and marxism
  • critical philosophy
  • socialist strategy today
  • education under capitalism
  • aesthetic ideologies
  • culture and the crisis
Submissions are closed. The deadline for the submission of abstracts was February 15, 2013.

phtgrphy-post

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 06:32

post-photo lec- 7page

post-photo 

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[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/47762992 w=500&h=281]
Aquatic centre. Short film by Cristobal Palma from LCLAOFFICE on Vimeo.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/ffDDry55CfQ?version=3&hl=en_US

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 05:49


We can even talk about new species in architecture wich are based in several biological formations. Marta Malé-Alemany and Luis Fraguada state on the book Antartica. Time of Change that natural structures attract architects because their physical characteristics are the result of a system that has been subjected to constantly variable conditions. In that sense, it’s easy to understand why so many architects and engineers have focused their attention on diatoms, a major group of algae that are encased within a unique cell wall made of silica [hydrated silicon dioxide] called a frustule. Thus, the diatom morphology is a great source of inspiration in developing structural strategies for the construction of complex forms.


not only the same happened at the art world…give examples


Antarctica: Time of Change 


Mireya Maso mostly works in video and photography, and in recent years she has essentially concerned herself with the study of human beings through their action on the landscape. In her project ANTARCTICA. TIME OF CHANGE, however, she engages with a natural landscape barely touched by man, and focuses her investigations on the mechanisms of perception of the human being in an environment in continual transformation. The conversations between the artist and scientists from different disciplines provide the basis for a discussion in the book which considers questions such as Perception in the Antarctic environment in terms of glaciology, biology, psychology, neurology and other disciplines, and The interpretation of Antarctic microorganisms from the perspective of bionanotechnology and architecture.








The Territory of the Virtually Unknown*


Svalbard. Photo by Reuben Wu
“Any environmental design task is characterized by an astounding amount of unavailable or indeterminate information.”
—Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine
The North and South Poles are somehow a terra incognita for architects. The harsh conditions of this environments are related more with the power of ideas than materiality, while we are still speculating about how to conquer this territory of the virtually unknown, as Peter Cook pointed on MAP 001 Antartica. These territories, the Artic and the Antartic, has been inspiration for artists, poets, musicians and architects, who have been working to discover the secrets hidden behind the masses of ice that shape these lands.
With all this facts in mind, it is interesting to revisit some history about built projects in this areas, such as theHalley VI Antartic Research Station or the Princess Elisabeth Station as examples to understand what have been done until now and to speculate on what can be done in the future. We have written before about the fascination of extreme environments and it seems that a good place to start researching about the environmental conditions of this kind of places is Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic, which constitutes the northernmost part of Norway. Svalbard is also known because of the Doomsday Vault, an emergency genebank located in the mountains above Longyearbyen or for the SOUSY Svalbard Radar, a so-called “mesosphere-stratosphere-troposphere”, a system to determine atmospheric parameters such as winds and turbulence from a few km altitude to over 100km and at a wide variety of spatial and temporal resolutions.
2
SOUSY Svalbard Radar in Svalbard. Photo by Reuben Wu
polar-11-of-30
Doomsday Vault in Svalbard. Photo by Reuben Wu
Paul D. Miller wrote on the Book of Ice:
“Looking back over the last several centuries, an intense amount of energy has been expended all over the world exploring and unraveling the meaning of humanity’s condition on the planet. Much of this energy has been spent in perverse and self-defeating ways. Our vision of modern life is tinged by events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which makes former disasters like the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident or the 1986 release of radioactive steam in Chernobyl seem quaint and self-contained. More than ever, we are interconnected, and interdependent. In the future, regardless of any human action, the planet will be here—we, as a species, might not.”
This idea of life disappearing from the planet is part of the motivation of creating bank seeds. MAP Architectshas designed the South Pole Universal Seed Archive with the aim to place the archive at the geographic South Pole and to take advantage of the already existing conditions. Mostly all of the seed archives built until now are housed in concrete bunkers, to avoid any kind of damage, but the main fact of this project is that is a seed archive without “architecture”. The proposal is that the landscape itself becomes the archive with the seeds saved in aluminium canisters buried five metres in the ice [not to be ground but stored]. One of the most interesting facts emerges with the use of geolocation technologies: “With each canister marked by a flag and a radio beacon, the archive becomes a map, a GPS landscape, charting the collection of seeds distributed radially and following the genetic relationship between the archived species.” This way, topography becomes alive with information.
MAP_01
South Pole Universal Seed Archive by MAP Architects
Going further we can remark the importance of transdiciplinarity in this field. To speculate and propose projects for such a difficult environment, there is a real need for architects to work side by side with scientist, biologist, physicist and other disciplines to discover new approaches to this frozen terrain that has long been Earth’s most mysterious region, in words of Brian Greene.
We can even talk about new species in architecture wich are based in several biological formations. Marta Malé-Alemany and Luis Fraguada state on the book Antartica. Time of Change that natural structures attract architects because their physical characteristics are the result of a system that has been subjected to constantly variable conditions. In that sense, it’s easy to understand why so many architects and engineers have focused their attention on diatoms, a major group of algae that are encased within a unique cell wall made of silica [hydrated silicon dioxide] called a frustule. Thus, the diatom morphology is a great source of inspiration in developing structural strategies for the construction of complex forms.
With the emergence of digital manufacturing and 3D printing processes, research projects in the fields of architecture and design are now capable to produce models and prototypes to test in a very accurate way a wide frame of new materials and structures. Following these ideas, the Istitute of Advanced Architecture has produced for the exhibition “Antartica. Time of Change” an interesting set of spheres based on the geometric analysis of diatoms, creating surfaces that could adopt a continuous, unbroken skeleton.
University-of-Hong-Kong-02-photo-dpr-barcelona
Work by the University of Hong Kong. Exhibited at the Beyond Media Festival
diatoms-exhibition-1
24 Spheres. IAAC participation at Antartica. Time of Change.
If we agree with Mireya Masó when she states that “Time becomes matter in the uninterrupted flow of sun and fog.”, it is possible to even go further on the explorations of this extreme landscape and use the same inspiration in some other places and contexts, as Luis Callejas and Lukas Pauer did when they directed the workshop “What Olmsted did not know: On snow storms“, where natural phenomena are the raw materials used to generate a projected landscape. The project Moku-Moku by Jason Brain, Sang Cho, Takuya Iwamura and Phoebe White is based on the idea of organize in a scientific way the different kinds of clouds, as they point “There are no kingdoms, phylums, orders or classes in the cloud-world, but there are families, genera, species and even subspecies.” In addition to enumerating the endemic behaviors of the three observed cloud species, the team explored ideas of chemical cloud seeding. By adding as little as 0.1 micrograms per liter of water of various compounds [USPHS safe], the visual qualities of the clouds can be drastically affected.
On this project, White, Iwamura, White and Cho also used balloons, not only for their connotation with weather patterns in our modern age, but also for the timeless wistfulness that they convey to everyone. The project is also a representation of how clouds imply landforms of interest beneath them, and how environmental conditions [such as wind force] can be used as inherent part of the proposal, as the way that wind deformation transforms the installation constantly.
Snow_01
Moku-Moku by Jason Brain, Sang Cho, Takuya Iwamura and Phoebe White.
Snow_02
Moku-Moku by Jason Brain, Sang Cho, Takuya Iwamura and Phoebe White.
In times when the horizon of unknown territories is moving faster than ever, instead of the old human desire of conquer nature maybe we should decide to abandon this new colonialism and try to remember that “space, once conquered, loses interest in the eyes both of the explorer and of a public that is avid for new feats.”, as Josep Perelló wrote. Or on the opposite, we should simply be humble enough to remember that nature has its own rules that are impossible to replicate in a perfect way.
We want to end with Matteo Pasquinelli words:
“Schematically, the question is how to apply the forms of the bios to the techne? And conversely, how to apply the forms of the techne to the bios? […] Instead of forcing biomimesis, such an investigation should trackbiomorphism, that is, the stratification and transmission of energy surplus through frictions, asymmetries and condensations.”
—–
The Territory of the Virtually Unknown*. Name taken of Peter Cook’s introduction to MAP 01: Antartica
Recommended readings:
[1] Antartica. Time of Change. Josep Perelló, Vicenc Altaió, Alicia Chillida. Actar, 2011.
[2] The Book of Ice. Paul D. Miller. Subliminal Kid Inc, 2011.
[3] Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory. Matteo Pasquinelli. Fibreculture #17: Unnatural ecologies, special issues on media ecology. 2011.

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to
our family
our neighborhood
our education
our job
our government
our city
our regions
our planet…
the planet and us within the planet.


What would be the main characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with essential urbanity?
– Against the spectacle of individual progress, the realised situationist urbanity introduces the recognition of “the other” and its differences as essential step towards collaboration.
– Against preserved education, it is posed learning through direct experience with relational civic interactions, conflict management and “doing with others” strategies.
– Against particularised design, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the available elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (the claim of exclusive authorship would reveal suspicious and works will no longer be stocked as commodities but as means to reach collective goals). The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and may become the key to access to all parallel universes created by a new conscious observation of all micro-ordinary events of the city.
– Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction, an art of conflict as enabling force. The enclosed era of primitivism and isolated design solutions must be superseded by complete communication and open peer to peer tools to reach dynamic equilibrium between opposites in a given urban system.
At micro-ordinary level, everyone will become a coder generating the conditions for its playful existence to insert and work within the urban system of interactions. 
It will happen that when opening the door and going where the street begins, it won’t appear the already known houses aligned in the moulded sidewalk, but a living forest where every moment “can be thrown like a magnolia and where the faces will born when looking at them”.[2] This violent emotive possession of the streets will provide exciting treasures for those drifters taking the challenge to explore alien quarters and neighbors.[3]
“”περίπατος- περιπλάνηση η αναδημιουργία του χάρτη(*) της πόλης μέσα από τη συνειρμική(**) συλλογή υλικού με χρονική ταυτότητα(***) …στόχος η εξερεύνηση  των παράξενων ,ανοίκειων, περιθωριακών, ετεροτοπικών, ονειρικών στοιχείων της πόλης που δεν υπάρχουν σε πρώτο πλάνο 
We have just move inside what will historically be the evolutive urban dimension. The role of amateur-professional —of adhocrat— is again a specialisation up to the point of social and mental interaction, when everyone becomes a node in the sense that the new system will remain in the strength of its connections. This task will be slowly filtering into to the society without a permanent division of labour, thus generating activities for which we haven’t invented the names yet.
To those who don’t understand us properly, we say with an irreducible will: “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of economic progress, in all its fictional forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of urbanity.”
“It is the business of the future to be dangerous” 
—A.N. Whitehead

http://sites.nationalacademies.org/CSTB/CompletedProjects/CSTB_042322

Doctor Atomic opera about the Manhattan Project
  • Breaking the Code, Broadway play about Alan Turing
  • A Beautiful Mind biography of John Nash
  • Laurie Anderson as NASA Artist in Residence
  • LOGICOMIX, graphical novel about the history of Logic
  • Bruce Nauman’s installations using infrared surveillance cameras
  • The Listening Post and Moveable Type collaborative projects of Mark Hansen (statistician) and Ben Rubin (artist)

Bridging the Two Cultures is a grand challenge.

 There is a fundamental asymmetry and complementarity between them: the word Science comes from the Greek “to cut.” The word Art comes from the Latin “to join.” 
what about the greek word +τεχνη- 
The results can be extremely productive by expanding public interest and engagement with both sectors, bringing new topics to new audiences, and educating and inspiring the next generation to transcend existing boundaries to discover and create the future of innovations. STEM fields have always valued creative minds, and the best artists excel at highly unconventional, unorthodox thinking. Artists also are excellent at capturing and representing the zeitgeist in elegant, compelling ways. That quality suggests that fruitful collaboration between scientists and artists can yield not only interesting ideas and “products,” they may also build in effective modes of communicating the value of that work to a wide audience.

8 Απριλίου 2013

b&h-pro-webd-tables-html-consuming-consumed-archive/ from simple html and js to dhtml , to html 5 and js sem 5-6

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 18:05
simple html
tags-elements
starting-ending
opening-closing concept
head section
body section
………..listen to the tutorial
texts-images-sounds

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/v4oN4DuR7YU?version=3&hl=en_US

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Wz2klMXDqF4?hl=en_US&version=3
uowm ftp server //

In more length: The term “HTML5” is widely used as a buzzword to refer to modern Web technologies, many of which (though by no means all) are developed at the WHATWG, in some cases in conjunction with the W3C and IETF.
The WHATWG work is all published in one specification (the one you are reading right now), parts of which are republished in an edition optimized for Web developers
The W3C also publishes parts of this specification as separate documents. One of these parts is called “HTML5”; it is a forked subset of this specification (the HTML Living Standard). There are numerous differences between this specification (the HTML Living Standard) and the W3C version, some minor, some major. Unfortunately these are not currently accurately documented anywhere, so there is no way to know which are intentional and which are not.

1.8 HTML vs XHTML


This section

non-normative.

 is 
This specification defines an abstract language for describing documents and applications, and some APIs for interacting with in-memory representations of resources that use this language.
The in-memory representation is known as “DOM HTML”, or “the DOM” for short.
There are various concrete syntaxes that can be used to transmit resources that use this abstract language, two of which are defined in this specification.
The first such concrete syntax is the HTML syntax. This is the format suggested for most authors. It is compatible with most legacy Web browsers. If a document is transmitted with the text/html MIME type, then it will be processed as an HTML document by Web browsers. This specification defines the latest HTML syntax, known simply as “HTML”.
The second concrete syntax is the XHTML syntax, which is an application of XML. When a document is transmitted with an XML MIME type, such as application/xhtml+xml, then it is treated as an XML document by Web browsers, to be parsed by an XML processor. Authors are reminded that the processing for XML and HTML differs; in particular, even minor syntax errors will prevent a document labeled as XML from being rendered fully, whereas they would be ignored in the HTML syntax. This specification defines the latest XHTML syntax, known simply as “XHTML”.
The DOM, the HTML syntax, and the XHTML syntax cannot all represent the same content. For example, namespaces cannot be represented using the HTML syntax, but they are supported in the DOM and in the XHTML syntax. Similarly, documents that use the noscript feature can be represented using the HTML syntax, but cannot be represented with the DOM or in the XHTML syntax. Comments that contain the string “-->” can only be represented in the DOM, not in the HTML and XHTML syntaxes.

αρχικό παράδειγμα γραφής dom html




A document with a short head


...
Here is an example of a longer one:





An application with a long head


http://support.js



...

ex

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the spectacle and the image- the origins of spectacle


The theory of mass culture-or mass audience culture, commercial culture, “popular”
culture, the culture industry, as it is variously known-has always tended to define its object
against so-called high culture without reflecting on the objective status of this opposition.
As so often, positions in this field reduce themselves to two mirror-images, and are
essentially staged in terms of value. Thus the familiar motif of elitism argues for the priority
of mass culture on the grounds of the sheer numbers of people exposed to it; the pursuit of
high or hermetic culture is then stigmatized as a status hobby of small groups of
intellectuals. As its anti-intellectual thrust suggests, this essentially negative position has
little theoretical content but clearly responds to a deeply rooted conviction in American
radicalism and articulates a widely based sense that high culture is an establishment
phenomenon, irredeemably tainted by its association with institutions, in particular with
the university. The value invoked is therefore a social one: it would be preferable to deal
with tv programs, The Godfather, orJaws, rather than with Wallace Stevens or HenryJames,
because the former clearly speak a cultural language meaningful to far wider strata of the
population than what is socially represented by intellectuals. Radicals are however also
intellectuals, so that this position has suspicious overtones of the guilt trip; meanwhile it
overlooks the anti-social and critical, negative (although generally not revolutionary)
stance of much of the most important forms of modem art; finally, it offers no method for
reading even those cultural objects it valorizes and has had little of interest to say about
their content

**html

Presentation related attributes

  • background (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and bgcolor (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attributes for body (required element according to the W3C.) element.
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attribute on divform, paragraph (p) and heading (h1h6) elements
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), noshade (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), size (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and width (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attributes on hr element
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), bordervspace and hspace attributes on img and object (caution: the object element is only supported in Internet Explorer (from the major browsers)) elements
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attribute on legend and caption elements
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and bgcolor (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) on table element
  • nowrap (Obsolete), bgcolor (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), widthheight on td and th elements
  • bgcolor (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attribute on tr element
  • clear (Obsolete) attribute on br element
  • compact attribute on dldir and menu elements
  • type (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), compact (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and start (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attributes on ol and ulelements
  • type and value attributes on li element
  • width attribute on pre element

HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags enclosed in angle brackets (like ), within the web page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like 

 and 

, although some tags, known as empty elements, are unpaired, for example . The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags). In between these tags web designers can add text, tags, comments and other types of text-based content.




Sample page


Sample page


This is a simple sample.




HTML documents 

Some features of HTML trade user convenience for a measure of user privacy.
In general, due to the Internet’s architecture, a user can be distinguished from another by the user’s IP address. IP addresses do not perfectly match to a user; as a user moves from device to device, or from network to network, their IP address will change; similarly, NAT routing, proxy servers, and shared computers enable packets that appear to all come from a single IP address to actually map to multiple users. Technologies such as onion routing can be used to further anonymize requests so that requests from a single user at one node on the Internet appear to come from many disparate parts of the network.
However, the IP address used for a user’s requests is not the only mechanism by which a user’s requests could be related to each other. Cookies, for example, are designed specifically to enable this, and are the basis of most of the Web’s session features that enable you to log into a site with which you have an account.
There are other mechanisms that are more subtle. Certain characteristics of a user’s system can be used to distinguish groups of users from each other; by collecting enough such information, an individual user’s browser’s “digital fingerprint” can be computed, which can be as good, if not better, as an IP address in ascertaining which requests are from the same user.
Grouping requests in this manner, especially across multiple sites, can be used for both benign (and even arguably positive) purposes, as well as for malevolent purposes. An example of a reasonably benign purpose would be determining whether a particular person seems to prefer sites with dog illustrations as opposed to sites with cat illustrations (based on how often they visit the sites in question) and then automatically using the preferred illustrations on subsequent visits to participating sites. Malevolent purposes, however, could include governments combining information such as the person’s home address (determined from the addresses they use when getting driving directions on one site) with their apparent political affiliations (determined by examining the forum sites that they participate in) to determine whether the person should be prevented from voting in an election.
Since the malevolent purposes can be remarkably evil, user agent implementors are encouraged to consider how to provide their users with tools to minimize leaking information that could be used to fingerprint a user.
Unfortunately, as the first paragraph in this section implies, sometimes there is great benefit to be derived from exposing the very information that can also be used for fingerprinting purposes, so it’s not as easy as simply blocking all possible leaks. For instance, the ability to log into a site to post under a specific identity requires that the user’s requests be identifiable as all being from the same user, more or less by definition. More subtly, though, information such as how wide text is, which is necessary for many effects that involve drawing text onto a canvas (e.g. any effect that involves drawing a border around the text) also leaks information that can be used to group a user’s requests. (In this case, by potentially exposing, via a brute force search, which fonts a user has installed, information which can vary considerably from user to user.)
Features in this specification which can be used to fingerprint the user are marked as this paragraph is.(This is a fingerprinting vector.)
Other features in the platform can be used for the same purpose, though, including, though not limited to:
  • The exact list of which features a user agents supports.
  • The maximum allowed stack depth for recursion in script.
  • Features that describe the user’s environment, like Media Queries and the Screen object. [MQ] [CSSOMVIEW]
  • The user’s time zone.

1.11 A quick introduction to HTML

Ready for first implementations
This section is non-normative.
A basic HTML document looks like this:



Sample page


Sample page


This is a simple sample.




HTML documents consist of a tree of elements and text. Each element is denoted in the source by a start tag, such as ““, and an end tag, such as ““. 
(Certain start tags and end tags can in certain cases be omitted and are implied by other tags.)
Tags have to be nested such that elements are all completely within each other, without overlapping:

This is very wrong!

This is correct.

This specification defines a set of elements that can be used in HTML, along with rules about the ways in which the elements can be nested.
Elements can have attributes, which control how the elements work. In the example below, there is a hyperlink, formed using the a element and itshref attribute:
simple
Attributes are placed inside the start tag, and consist of a name and a value, separated by an “=” character. The attribute value can remainunquoted if it doesn’t contain space characters or any of " ' ` = < or >. Otherwise, it has to be quoted using either single or double quotes. The value, along with the “=” character, can be omitted altogether if the value is the empty string.









HTML user agents (e.g. Web browsers) then parse this markup, turning it into a DOM (Document Object Model) tree. A DOM tree is an in-memory representation of a document.
DOM trees contain several kinds of nodes, in particular a DocumentType node, Element nodes, Text nodes, Comment nodes, and in some cases ProcessingInstruction nodes.
The markup snippet at the top of this section would be turned into the following DOM tree:
  • DOCTYPE: html
  • html
    • head
      • #text⏎␣␣
      • title
        • #textSample page
      • #text⏎␣
    • #text⏎␣
    • body
      • #text⏎␣␣
      • h1
        • #textSample page
      • #text⏎␣␣
      • p
        • #textThis is a
        • a href=”demo.html
          • #textsimple
        • #textsample.
      • #text⏎␣␣
      • #commentthis is a comment
      • #text⏎␣⏎
The root element of this tree is the html element, which is the element always found at the root of HTML documents. It contains two elements,head and body, as well as a Text node between them.
There are many more Text nodes in the DOM tree than one would initially expect, because the source contains a number of spaces (represented here by “␣”) and line breaks (“⏎”) that all end up as Text nodes in the DOM. However, for historical reasons not all of the spaces and line breaks in the original markup appear in the DOM. In particular, all the whitespace before head start tag ends up being dropped silently, and all the whitespace after the body end tag ends up placed at the end of the body.
The head element contains a title element, which itself contains a Text node with the text “Sample page”. Similarly, the body element contains an h1 element, a p element, and a comment.

This DOM tree can be manipulated from scripts in the page. Scripts (typically in JavaScript) are small programs that can be embedded using thescript element or using event handler content attributes. For example, here is a form with a script that sets the value of the form’s outputelement to say “Hello World”:
<form name="main">
Result: <output name="result">
<script>
document.forms.main.elements.result.value = 'Hello World';

Each element in the DOM tree is represented by an object, and these objects have APIs so that they can be manipulated. For instance, a link (e.g. the a element in the tree above) can have its “href” attribute changed in several ways:
var a = document.links[0]; // obtain the first link in the document
a.href = 'sample.html'; // change the destination URL of the link
a.protocol = 'https'; // change just the scheme part of the URL
a.setAttribute('href', 'http://example.com/'); // change the content attribute directly
Since DOM trees are used as the way to represent HTML documents when they are processed and presented by implementations (especially interactive implementations like Web browsers), this specification is mostly phrased in terms of DOM trees, instead of the markup described above.

HTML documents represent a media-independent description of interactive content. HTML documents might be rendered to a screen, or through a speech synthesizer, or on a braille display. To influence exactly how such rendering takes place, authors can use a styling language such as CSS.
In the following example, the page has been made yellow-on-blue using CSS.



Sample styled page

body { background: navy; color: yellow; }



Sample styled page


This page is just a demo.



For more details on how to use HTML, authors are encouraged to consult tutorials and guides. Some of the examples included in this specification might also be of use, but the novice author is cautioned that this specification, by necessity, defines the language with a level of detail that might be difficult to understand at first.

1.11.1 Writing secure applications with HTML

This section is non-normative.
When HTML is used to create interactive sites, care needs to be taken to avoid introducing vulnerabilities through which attackers can compromise the integrity of the site itself or of the site’s users.
A comprehensive study of this matter is beyond the scope of this document, and authors are strongly encouraged to study the matter in more detail. However, this section attempts to provide a quick introduction to some common pitfalls in HTML application development.
The security model of the Web is based on the concept of “origins”, and correspondingly many of the potential attacks on the Web involve cross-origin actions. [ORIGIN]
Not validating user input
Cross-site scripting (XSS)
SQL injection
When accepting untrusted input, e.g. user-generated content such as text comments, values in URL parameters, messages from third-party sites, etc, it is imperative that the data be validated before use, and properly escaped when displayed. Failing to do this can allow a hostile user to perform a variety of attacks, ranging from the potentially benign, such as providing bogus user information like a negative age, to the serious, such as running scripts every time a user looks at a page that includes the information, potentially propagating the attack in the process, to the catastrophic, such as deleting all data in the server.
When writing filters to validate user input, it is imperative that filters always be whitelist-based, allowing known-safe constructs and disallowing all other input. Blacklist-based filters that disallow known-bad inputs and allow everything else are not secure, as not everything that is bad is yet known (for example, because it might be invented in the future).
For example, suppose a page looked at its URL’s query string to determine what to display, and the site then redirected the user to that page to display a message, as in:
If the message was just displayed to the user without escaping, a hostile attacker could then craft a URL that contained a script element:
http://example.com/message.cgi?say=%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%27Oh%20no%21%27%29%3C/script%3E
If the attacker then convinced a victim user to visit this page, a script of the attacker’s choosing would run on the page. Such a script could do any number of hostile actions, limited only by what the site offers: if the site is an e-commerce shop, for instance, such a script could cause the user to unknowingly make arbitrarily many unwanted purchases.
This is called a cross-site scripting attack.
There are many constructs that can be used to try to trick a site into executing code. Here are some that authors are encouraged to consider when writing whitelist filters:
  • When allowing harmless-seeming elements like img, it is important to whitelist any provided attributes as well. If one allowed all attributes then an attacker could, for instance, use the onload attribute to run arbitrary script.
  • When allowing URLs to be provided (e.g. for links), the scheme of each URL also needs to be explicitly whitelisted, as there are many schemes that can be abused. The most prominent example is “javascript:“, but user agents can implement (and indeed, have historically implemented) others.
  • Allowing a base element to be inserted means any script elements in the page with relative links can be hijacked, and similarly that any form submissions can get redirected to a hostile site.
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF)
If a site allows a user to make form submissions with user-specific side-effects, for example posting messages on a forum under the user’s name, making purchases, or applying for a passport, it is important to verify that the request was made by the user intentionally, rather than by another site tricking the user into making the request unknowingly.
This problem exists because HTML forms can be submitted to other origins.
Sites can prevent such attacks by populating forms with user-specific hidden tokens, or by checking Origin headers on all requests.
Clickjacking
A page that provides users with an interface to perform actions that the user might not wish to perform needs to be designed so as to avoid the possibility that users can be tricked into activating the interface.
One way that a user could be so tricked is if a hostile site places the victim site in a small iframe and then convinces the user to click, for instance by having the user play a reaction game. Once the user is playing the game, the hostile site can quickly position the iframe under the mouse cursor just as the user is about to click, thus tricking the user into clicking the victim site’s interface.
To avoid this, sites that do not expect to be used in frames are encouraged to only enable their interface if they detect that they are not in a frame (e.g. by comparing the window object to the value of the top attribute).

1.11.2 Common pitfalls to avoid when using the scripting APIs

This section is non-normative.
Scripts in HTML have “run-to-completion” semantics, meaning that the browser will generally run the script uninterrupted before doing anything else, such as firing further events or continuing to parse the document.
On the other hand, parsing of HTML files happens asynchronously and incrementally, meaning that the parser can pause at any point to let scripts run. This is generally a good thing, but it does mean that authors need to be careful to avoid hooking event handlers after the events could have possibly fired.
There are two techniques for doing this reliably: use event handler content attributes, or create the element and add the event handlers in the same script. The latter is safe because, as mentioned earlier, scripts are run to completion before further events can fire.
One way this could manifest itself is with img elements and the load event. The event could fire as soon as the element has been parsed, especially if the image has already been cached (which is common).
Here, the author uses the onload handler on an img element to catch the load event:
Games
If the element is being added by script, then so long as the event handlers are added in the same script, the event will still not be missed:

var img = new Image();
img.src = 'games.png';
img.alt = 'Games';
img.onload = gamesLogoHasLoaded;
// img.addEventListener('load', gamesLogoHasLoaded, false); // would work also
However, if the author first created the img element and then in a separate script added the event listeners, there’s a chance that theload event would be fired in between, leading it to be missed:

Games
<!-- the 'load' event might fire here while the parser is taking a
break, in which case you will not see it! -->

var img = document.getElementById('games');
img.onload = gamesLogoHasLoaded; // might never fire!

1.12 Conformance requirements for authors

This section is non-normative.
Unlike previous versions of the HTML specification, this specification defines in some detail the required processing for invalid documents as well as valid documents.
However, even though the processing of invalid content is in most cases well-defined, conformance requirements for documents are still important: in practice, interoperability (the situation in which all implementations process particular content in a reliable and identical or equivalent way) is not the only goal of document conformance requirements. This section details some of the more common reasons for still distinguishing between a conforming document and one with errors.

1.12.1 Presentational markup

This section is non-normative.
The majority of presentational features from previous versions of HTML are no longer allowed. Presentational markup in general has been found to have a number of problems:
The use of presentational elements leads to poorer accessibility
While it is possible to use presentational markup in a way that provides users of assistive technologies (ATs) with an acceptable experience (e.g. using ARIA), doing so is significantly more difficult than doing so when using semantically-appropriate markup. Furthermore, even using such techniques doesn’t help make pages accessible for non-AT non-graphical users, such as users of text-mode browsers.
Using media-independent markup, on the other hand, provides an easy way for documents to be authored in such a way that they work for more users (e.g. text browsers).
Higher cost of maintenance
It is significantly easier to maintain a site written in such a way that the markup is style-independent. For example, changing the color of a site that uses  throughout requires changes across the entire site, whereas a similar change to a site based on CSS can be done by changing a single file.
Larger document sizes
Presentational markup tends to be much more redundant, and thus results in larger document sizes.
For those reasons, presentational markup has been removed from HTML in this version. This change should not come as a surprise; HTML4 deprecated presentational markup many years ago and provided a mode (HTML4 Transitional) to help authors move away from presentational markup; later, XHTML 1.1 went further and obsoleted those features altogether.
The only remaining presentational markup features in HTML are the style attribute and the style element. Use of the style attribute is somewhat discouraged in production environments, but it can be useful for rapid prototyping (where its rules can be directly moved into a separate style sheet later) and for providing specific styles in unusual cases where a separate style sheet would be inconvenient. Similarly, thestyle element can be useful in syndication or for page-specific styles, but in general an external style sheet is likely to be more convenient when the styles apply to multiple pages.
It is also worth noting that some elements that were previously presentational have been redefined in this specification to be media-independent:bihrssmall, and u.

1.12.2 Syntax errors

This section is non-normative.
The syntax of HTML is constrained to avoid a wide variety of problems.
Unintuitive error-handling behavior
Certain invalid syntax constructs, when parsed, result in DOM trees that are highly unintuitive.
For example, the following markup fragment results in a DOM with an hr element that is an earlier sibling of the correspondingtable element:

...
Errors with optional error recovery
To allow user agents to be used in controlled environments without having to implement the more bizarre and convoluted error handling rules, user agents are permitted to fail whenever encountering a parse error.
Errors where the error-handling behavior is not compatible with streaming user agents
Some error-handling behavior, such as the behavior for the 


... example mentioned above, are incompatible with streaming user agents (user agents that process HTML files in one pass, without storing state). To avoid interoperability problems with such user agents, any syntax resulting in such behavior is considered invalid.

Errors that can result in infoset coercion
When a user agent based on XML is connected to an HTML parser, it is possible that certain invariants that XML enforces, such as comments never containing two consecutive hyphens, will be violated by an HTML file. Handling this can require that the parser coerce the HTML DOM into an XML-compatible infoset. Most syntax constructs that require such handling are considered invalid.
Errors that result in disproportionally poor performance
Certain syntax constructs can result in disproportionally poor performance. To discourage the use of such constructs, they are typically made non-conforming.
For example, the following markup results in poor performance, since all the unclosed i elements have to be reconstructed in each paragraph, resulting in progressively more elements in each paragraph:

He dreamt.

He dreamt that he ate breakfast.

Then lunch.

And finally dinner.

The resulting DOM for this fragment would be:
  • p
    • i
      • #textHe dreamt.
  • p
    • i
      • i
        • #textHe dreamt that he ate breakfast.
  • p
    • i
      • i
        • i
          • #textThen lunch.
  • p
    • i
      • i
        • i
          • i
            • #textAnd finally dinner.
Errors involving fragile syntax constructs
There are syntax constructs that, for historical reasons, are relatively fragile. To help reduce the number of users who accidentally run into such problems, they are made non-conforming.
For example, the parsing of certain named character references in attributes happens even with the closing semicolon being omitted. It is safe to include an ampersand followed by letters that do not form a named character reference, but if the letters are changed to a string that does form a named character reference, they will be interpreted as that character instead.
In this fragment, the attribute’s value is “?bill&ted“:
Bill and Ted
In the following fragment, however, the attribute’s value is actually “?art©“, not the intended “?art&copy“, because even without the final semicolon, “&copy” is handled the same as “©” and thus gets interpreted as “©“:
Art and Copy
To avoid this problem, all named character references are required to end with a semicolon, and uses of named character references without a semicolon are flagged as errors.
Thus, the correct way to express the above cases is as follows:
Bill and Ted 
Art and Copy <!-- the & has to be escaped, since &copy is a named character reference -->
Errors involving known interoperability problems in legacy user agents
Certain syntax constructs are known to cause especially subtle or serious problems in legacy user agents, and are therefore marked as non-conforming to help authors avoid them.
For example, this is why the U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT character (`) is not allowed in unquoted attributes. In certain legacy user agents, it is sometimes treated as a quote character.
Another example of this is the DOCTYPE, which is required to trigger no-quirks mode, because the behavior of legacy user agents in quirks mode is often largely undocumented.
Errors that risk exposing authors to security attacks
Certain restrictions exist purely to avoid known security problems.
For example, the restriction on using UTF-7 exists purely to avoid authors falling prey to a known cross-site-scripting attack using UTF-7.
Cases where the author’s intent is unclear
Markup where the author’s intent is very unclear is often made non-conforming. Correcting these errors early makes later maintenance easier.
For example, it is unclear whether the author intended the following to be an h1 heading or an h2 heading:

Contact details

Cases that are likely to be typos
When a user makes a simple typo, it is helpful if the error can be caught early, as this can save the author a lot of debugging time. This specification therefore usually considers it an error to use element names, attribute names, and so forth, that do not match the names defined in this specification.
For example, if the author typed  instead of 

, this would be flagged as an error and the author could correct the typo immediately.
Errors that could interfere with new syntax in the future
In order to allow the language syntax to be extended in the future, certain otherwise harmless features are disallowed.
For example, “attributes” in end tags are ignored currently, but they are invalid, in case a future change to the language makes use of that syntax feature without conflicting with already-deployed (and valid!) content.
Some authors find it helpful to be in the practice of always quoting all attributes and always including all optional tags, preferring the consistency derived from such custom over the minor benefits of terseness afforded by making use of the flexibility of the HTML syntax. To aid such authors, conformance checkers can provide modes of operation wherein such conventions are enforced.

1.12.3 Restrictions on content models and on attribute values

This section is non-normative.
Beyond the syntax of the language, this specification also places restrictions on how elements and attributes can be specified. These restrictions are present for similar reasons:
Errors involving content with dubious semantics
To avoid misuse of elements with defined meanings, content models are defined that restrict how elements can be nested when such nestings would be of dubious value.
For example, this specification disallows nesting a section element inside a kbd element, since it is highly unlikely for an author to indicate that an entire section should be keyed in.
Errors that involve a conflict in expressed semantics
Similarly, to draw the author’s attention to mistakes in the use of elements, clear contradictions in the semantics expressed are also considered conformance errors.
In the fragments below, for example, the semantics are nonsensical: a separator cannot simultaneously be a cell, nor can a radio button be a progress bar.


Another example is the restrictions on the content models of the ul element, which only allows li element children. Lists by definition consist just of zero or more list items, so if a ul element contains something other than an li element, it’s not clear what was meant.
Cases where the default styles are likely to lead to confusion
Certain elements have default styles or behaviors that make certain combinations likely to lead to confusion. Where these have equivalent alternatives without this problem, the confusing combinations are disallowed.
For example, div elements are rendered as block boxes, and span elements as inline boxes. Putting a block box in an inline box is unnecessarily confusing; since either nesting just div elements, or nesting just span elements, or nesting span elements insidediv elements all serve the same purpose as nesting a div element in a span element, but only the latter involves a block box in an inline box, the latter combination is disallowed.
Another example would be the way interactive content cannot be nested. For example, a button element cannot contain atextarea element. This is because the default behavior of such nesting interactive elements would be highly confusing to users. Instead of nesting these elements, they can be placed side by side.
Errors that indicate a likely misunderstanding of the specification
Sometimes, something is disallowed because allowing it would likely cause author confusion.
For example, setting the disabled attribute to the value “false” is disallowed, because despite the appearance of meaning that the element is enabled, it in fact means that the element is disabled (what matters for implementations is the presence of the attribute, not its value).
Errors involving limits that have been imposed merely to simplify the language
Some conformance errors simplify the language that authors need to learn.
For example, the area element’s shape attribute, despite accepting both circ and circle values in practice as synonyms, disallows the use of the circ value, so as to simplify tutorials and other learning aids. There would be no benefit to allowing both, but it would cause extra confusion when teaching the language.
Errors that involve peculiarities of the parser
Certain elements are parsed in somewhat eccentric ways (typically for historical reasons), and their content model restrictions are intended to avoid exposing the author to these issues.
For example, a form element isn’t allowed inside phrasing content, because when parsed as HTML, a form element’s start tag will imply a p element’s end tag. Thus, the following markup results in two paragraphs, not one:

Welcome. Name:

It is parsed exactly like the following:

Welcome.

Name:
Errors that would likely result in scripts failing in hard-to-debug ways
Some errors are intended to help prevent script problems that would be hard to debug.
This is why, for instance, it is non-conforming to have two id attributes with the same value. Duplicate IDs lead to the wrong element being selected, with sometimes disastrous effects whose cause is hard to determine.
Errors that waste authoring time
Some constructs are disallowed because historically they have been the cause of a lot of wasted authoring time, and by encouraging authors to avoid making them, authors can save time in future efforts.
For example, a script element’s src attribute causes the element’s contents to be ignored. However, this isn’t obvious, especially if the element’s contents appear to be executable script — which can lead to authors spending a lot of time trying to debug the inline script without realizing that it is not executing. To reduce this problem, this specification makes it non-conforming to have executable script in a script element when the src attribute is present. This means that authors who are validating their documents are less likely to waste time with this kind of mistake.
Errors that involve areas that affect authors migrating to and from XHTML
Some authors like to write files that can be interpreted as both XML and HTML with similar results. Though this practice is discouraged in general due to the myriad of subtle complications involved (especially when involving scripting, styling, or any kind of automated serialization), this specification has a few restrictions intended to at least somewhat mitigate the difficulties. This makes it easier for authors to use this as a transitionary step when migrating between HTML and XHTML.
For example, there are somewhat complicated rules surrounding the lang and xml:lang attributes intended to keep the two synchronized.
Another example would be the restrictions on the values of xmlns attributes in the HTML serialization, which are intended to ensure that elements in conforming documents end up in the same namespaces whether processed as HTML or XML.
Errors that involve areas reserved for future expansion
As with the restrictions on the syntax intended to allow for new syntax in future revisions of the language, some restrictions on the content models of elements and values of attributes are intended to allow for future expansion of the HTML vocabulary.
For example, limiting the values of the target attribute that start with an U+005F LOW LINE character (_) to only specific predefined values allows new predefined values to be introduced at a future time without conflicting with author-defined values.
Errors that indicate a mis-use of other specifications
Certain restrictions are intended to support the restrictions made by other specifications.
For example, requiring that attributes that take media queries use only valid media queries reinforces the importance of following the conformance rules of that specification.

1.13 Suggested reading

This section is non-normative.
The following documents might be of interest to readers of this specification.
Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals [CHARMOD]
This Architectural Specification provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web, building on the Universal Character Set, defined jointly by the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. Topics addressed include use of the terms ‘character’, ‘encoding’ and ‘string’, a reference processing model, choice and identification of character encodings, character escaping, and string indexing.
Unicode Security Considerations [UTR36]
Because Unicode contains such a large number of characters and incorporates the varied writing systems of the world, incorrect usage can expose programs or systems to possible security attacks. This is especially important as more and more products are internationalized. This document describes some of the security considerations that programmers, system analysts, standards developers, and users should take into account, and provides specific recommendations to reduce the risk of problems.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 [WCAG]
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 [ATAG]
This specification provides guidelines for designing Web content authoring tools that are more accessible for people with disabilities. An authoring tool that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility by providing an accessible user interface to authors with disabilities as well as by enabling, supporting, and promoting the production of accessible Web content by all authors.
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0 [UAAG]
This document provides guidelines for designing user agents that lower barriers to Web accessibility for people with disabilities. User agents include browsers and other types of software that retrieve and render Web content. A user agent that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility through its own user interface and through other internal facilities, including its ability to communicate with other technologies (especially assistive technologies). Furthermore, all users, not just users with disabilities, should find conforming user agents to be more usable.

4.2.3 The base element


The
 base element allows authors to specify the document base URL for the purposes of resolving relative URLs, and the name of the defaultbrowsing context for the purposes of following hyperlinks. The element does not represent any content beyond this information.Categories:
Metadata content.
Contexts in which this element can be used:
In a head element containing no other base elements.
Content model:
Empty.
Tag omission in text/html:
No end tag.
Content attributes:
Global attributes
href — Document base URL
target — Default browsing context for hyperlink navigation and form submission
DOM interface:
interface HTMLBaseElement : HTMLElement {
attribute DOMString href;
attribute DOMString target;
};
There must be no more than one base element per document.
base element must have either an href attribute, a target attribute, or both.
The href content attribute, if specified, must contain a valid URL potentially surrounded by spaces.
base element, if it has an href attribute, must come before any other elements in the tree that have attributes defined as taking URLs, except the html element (its manifest attribute isn’t affected by base elements).
If there are multiple base elements with href attributes, all but the first are ignored.
The target attribute, if specified, must contain a valid browsing context name or keyword, which specifies which browsing context is to be used as the default when hyperlinks and forms in the Document cause navigation.
base element, if it has a target attribute, must come before any elements in the tree that represent hyperlinks.
If there are multiple base elements with target attributes, all but the first are ignored.
The href IDL attribute, on getting, must return the result of running the following algorithm:
  1. If the base element has no href content attribute, then return the document base URL and abort these steps.
  2. Let fallback base url be the Document‘s fallback base URL.
  3. Let url be the value of the href attribute of the base element.
  4. Resolve url relative to fallback base url (thus, the base href attribute isn’t affected by xml:base attributes or base elements).
  5. If the previous step was successful, return the resulting absolute URL and abort these steps.
  6. Otherwise, return the empty string.
The href IDL attribute, on setting, must set the href content attribute to the given new value.
The target IDL attribute must reflect the content attribute of the same name.
In this example, a base element is used to set the document base URL:



This is an example for the <base> element



Visit the archives.



The link in the above example would be a link to “http://www.example.com/news/archives.html“.

b&h-pro-webd-tables-html-

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