Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

LCARS stands for Library Computer Access and Retrieval System, and is the bane, or the Holy Grail, of Trek web design. I’m all for controversial designs based on authentic Trek colors so I’ve made an LCARS style sheet for MoveableType. There’s just one catch: you have to use Mozilla to see it. Netscape 7 would probably also work, but IE is counterindicated.

Usually LCARS sites are nasty table-based graphics-heavy things, but by specifying curved borders in your stylesheets, you can reproduce a Star Trek-style computer console without a single image. Only Mozilla supports curved borders, using the -moz-border-radius tags. I am not responsible for what you see if you click the LCARS-1 link in an unsupported browser.

Besides sprucing up the archives page, I also spent some time blogsurfing for good MT style. I found someone’s old entry on the issue of stylesheets and images - that is, how people who use CSS for web design look down on images. I hadn’t thought about it, but I also have a ingrained prejudice against images, which probably dates back to the days of Netscape 1.1 and plain grey pages with plain black text and plain blue links. It doesn’t help that I still connect with a 56k modem over a bad phone line - images make me run screaming the other way.

I did surf into some nice uses of images in blog design, though, in the rather restricted arena of banners and backgrounds: take a look at a plain banner, a fancy banner, and a banner that’s also a fixed background image.

On a mostly-unrelated Trek note, I saw “Time and Again”, one of the very first episodes of Voyager, recently with Dr. Deb. I annoyed her to no end by exclaiming how cute Janeway and Paris were together. The technobabble was a bit painful, but the episode was relatively good for first season Voyager. I should also confess that I saw Enterprise: Return of the Shower Scene this week while I was waiting for The Twilight Zone to come on. There was absolutely nothing interesting about the episode - but then, similar comments have been made about “Resolutions,” the sleeper that spawned an entire shipper movement.

I think it’s safe to say I will never write Archer/T’Pol.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 17th, 2002 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.