Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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Horror Show | Aug 13 2002

Oblivio has been overhauled. Among the highlights:

• Table hacks, be gone! Layout is now handled with cascading style sheets. Hoo-ha.
• Inspired in large part by Mark Pilgrim’s splendid series Dive into Accessibility, I’ve made myriad heart-breaking compromises of my design aesthetic accessibility-related changes.
• Movable Type, pound-for-pound the best personal web publishing system ever, has joined the Oblivio “Production and Archival Department.”

The first two items above warrant some scintillating non-technical elaboration, which I plan to attempt later. For now all I can say is that everything was much harder to do than I imagined, despite the fact that I was already imagining everything would be much harder than I imagined. I mean, I began from how hard I thought everything would be, multiplied this by the usual you-know-things-never-go-as-planned factor, then multiplied this by a no-seriously-it’s-going-to-harder-still factor, and still came nowhere close to imagining the horrors ahead.

It turned out to be a case wherein I wouldn’t have dared to do the thing I did had I known what I now know, having done the thing. Certain relationships are like this, but that is different. It’s different because the reasons one has relationships are different from the reasons one overhauls one’s website.

I think.

One final note: It was hard.