Slashdot's Vastu 386
nanopolitan writes "Wired has a story on harmonious website design according to Vastu, 'the Indian counterpart of feng shui'. The graphic accompanying the story has an analysis of Slashdot's design by Dr. Smita Narang. Her verdict? This site is 'in desperate need of balance'." From the article: "Thirty-year-old Smita Narang is rapidly becoming one of India's hottest Web designers. Her method: applying vastu shastra, the Indian counterpart of feng shui, to the online realm. The process entails mapping page attributes - HTML, colors, graphics - to elements like fire, water, and air. 'Any disturbance of these established elements can cause an imbalance in the site that directly affects its business,' Narang says."
Re:Shouldn't there be a foot icon? (Score:1, Interesting)
Design of the Book's site (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming that the site for the book (http://www.webvastu.com/ [webvastu.com]) was done according to the principles within it I don't see what this text could offer. My knee-jerk reaction to the aesthetics of the site is that it looks as if it were done using the Frontpage WYSIWYG in 1997. Looking at the HTML the site uses table based design, has presentation markup in the html, and contains a host of other minor errors (i.e. uppercase tags). The CSS http://www.webvastu.com/style.css [webvastu.com]) is a mess and demonstrates a lack of understanding of modern 'best practices'.
I might be able to accept the idea of some people using such a whishy-washy approach to design if the end product could stand on its own but that's not what I'm seeing by any measure.
Re:Page length (Score:4, Interesting)
Gotta agree with that. People who want multiple pages are usually trying to pump ad views. This chick just seems to want to make things pretty, or her version of pretty anyway. I guess if you can spout BS well enough to sound knowledgeable, people will throw money at you. Serves no useful purpose to anyone else, but must be nice.
Re:Is it all BS? Is Christopher Alexander bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
This phrase summarizes the only real redeaming quality of "sciences" like Feng Shui.
The truth is, there is no "science" behind these collective wisdoms. But that doesn't mean all of the conclusions derived are by definition wrong. Unscientific and wrong are not the same thing.
Once upon a time, collective wisdom (in some areas of human civilization) stated that the sun rose every day, carried on the chariot of a God. One could argue that this perception derived from the collective experience of a shared physical observation, the human desire to understand that experience, and the state of human understanding of the world at the time. Many religious beliefs could be seen to have possibly been derived this way.
Now, a citizen could use that understanding to predict the sun would rise the next day (cloud cover aside). Very unscientific, as the belief Helios was at work was based on very unprovable assumptions. But the prediction could hardly be called wrong.
Collective wisdom can provide valuable information, even if the method it is arrived at is little more tha trial and error with a folk explanation on top of it. The folk explanation could be seen as being a handed down tag-on from a "knowledgible leader" ages back who capatilized on mankind's need to understand as a means of self promotion.
Re:We don' need no steenking standards... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, HTML IS a programming language: it is one of the semantic mark-up languages of the SGML family [wikipedia.org], designed for computerized implementation. I think what you meant is that HTML is not an imperative language [wikipedia.org] like Fortran, Cobol, ..., Perl, or Python. HTML is instead a declarative language [wikipedia.org], like most other markup languages, or the regex language embedded in Perl. These state what should be done (while an imperative language defines how a procedure is to be done).
I have been working with HTML since 1995, so you have a year more experience than I do.
Perhaps because I have less experience, I have had no difficulty with adjusting to the more rigorous requirements of HTML 4.01 Strict, and I very much appreciate the greater power that is now available to me in using CSS and DHTML techniques on my pages. I am currently very interested in the subset of possibilities that are now available with "Ajax" or "Web 2.0" techniques, and I think the need to be a little fussier in using the HTML language correctly is a small price to pay for things like Google Maps and other interactive web pages.