Uribe & Andrews -> Loomoja in Turku

Loomoja is a literary magazine from Turku/Helsinki Finland that usually is
print-only. The current issue also involves a Web component (
http://www.unikankare.net/lumooja/liike/ ) with work by Marko Niemi, Miia
Toivio, Henna Lasorla, Anne Varis, Teemu Ikonen, Jussi Lahti, Timo Harju &
Saija Sofia, Ana Maria Uribe, and myself. They have gone to considerable
work to translate some of Ana Maria Uribe's work (she's from Argentina) and
some of my work into Finnish.

It's great to see that this usually-print-only magazine is making this sort
of foray into digital poetry.

Marko Niemi, one of the Loomoja editors and also the translator of Ana
Maria's work and mine, has not only translated four of my fairly difficult
DHTML pieces into Finnish, but he has also updated the code. He is also a
programmer. The English versions of these pieces mostly run on only IE for
the PC (Seattle Drift runs on the Mac). Marko has upgraded the code so that
they also run on Netscape 6+ and Firefox for the PC.

These pieces of mine were written between 1997 and 1999. If you were online
at that time, you might recall that was the time of the 'browser wars'
between Microsoft and Netscape. Quite a few people who were doing web.art in
DHTML found that, at a certain point in the browser wars, they could no
longer really commit to making work in a medium where the code probably
wasn't going to work on future machines for very long. The browser wars
seemed to indicate that stuff for the Web was not meant to have any
longevity. Netscape discontinued some of their code (such as the <layer>
tag) that was important to some web.art works (I never used it), and it
became hopelessly complex to try to make DHTML (Dynamic HTML) pieces that
worked on more than one browser on more than one platform (Mac/PC/Linux etc)
if you also wanted to push the programmerly aspect and not settle for simple
mouseovers.

We're a few years past that point now, and what is the state of things? I
find it encouraging that Marko was able to upgrade this code so that it runs
on more browsers than it did before. Perhaps W3C standards are starting to
have an effect. He tells me that the amount of browser sniffing he needed to
do in order to get the code running on different browsers, while using only
one file, was minimal. So it looks like cross-browser DHTML is at least a
bit less of a headache than it used to be.

I will study Marko's work to update the code of the English versions so that
they too will run on the other browsers. And of course will refresh my DHTML
in the meantime.

Marko has also published his translations of my work and Ana Maria's work on
his own site at
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/marniemi/etnodada/vierashuone.html

ja