Jesus, worry about slog's butt-ugliness before talking shit about other people's sites.

Those in glass houses and what not.

So if it's possible to scrounge up (or steal, or sneak in and photograph) digital images of the artworks you want to see on the web, and you can research the itinerary and so on, then interested parties could make their own alternative counter web sites of their favorite museum (or least favorite museum web site).

If the museum has a problem with having a shadow web site, it's an opportunity to publicize how much they suck. Seems like kind of a fun project.

And yes, perhaps the Slog could give some consideration to upgrading their uh, thing. Look at Daily Kos, for example. People there have conversations. Yeah, I know. Conversations! And the technology that makes that possible is free.

- Show comments in a threaded format.
- Display only headlines of comments without body text.
- Keep numbered reply references after spam is deleted (if I say @4 and then later on #3 is deleted, then 4 is a different comment).
- List all comments by a certain user.
- Notify you when there are any replies to a thread, or any replies to your own post.
- Allow user to rate other comments.
- Let commentors embed images in their comments.

I could go on. Not all of these things are necessarily desirable, but as it is Slog comments are just "a one-million-mile scroll," which doesn't score very high as far as utility goes. The nicest thing I can say about the Slog is there are no smilies.

Aesthetic judgments are most definitely immaterial, but many of the things that most make life worth living are by nature immaterial.

If it's any consolation, Jen, most museums NOT in Seattle have crusty ass websites too.

Signed,
The Ignorant

For the sight-impaired, they just don't exist. The code is not searchable so their voice-readers have nothing to read.

Also, you can't link to individual flash pages, and since the code isn't searchable, they don't rank well with search engines.

Flash is an awful program that is not very easy to learn and update. If you do your site in PHP or straight up HTML, you can maintain it more easily.

The lack of images at museums could be due to artist's reproduction rights for Contemporary Arts. Anything before 1923 should fall into Public Domain. As arts educational institutions, Museums should be able to display works in their collections under the "fair use" standard. Perhaps a "Law Eagle" out their could clear this point up.

All of these institutions should devolve control of their web sites to the various appropriate Curatorial departments using dynamic PHP with MYSQL databases. That way there is more than one person posting content and there is less of a work flow log jam that IT departments are notorious for.

Then again, what do I know?

I was just in LA and if you want to see a site that is really impressive, go to the MOCA.org site for the Murakami exhibit that's on now. http://www.moca.org/murakami/

There's even behind the scenes video but it makes total sense given the commercialism of the subject matter. And this show is so large that the site makes the show more appealing, in my opinion.

The problem is that you are trying to make something that has the accessibility of a "store" without the stigma or vibe. And you're trying to make something that reflects the artistic essence of the subject matter without clashing with it or cluttering it up. And when this changes regularly it's hard to have a flexible skin (web interface skin).

There's a lot of information to cram in but its really easy for it to become unwieldy - especially when the person with the final vision doesn't know the first thing about the dynamics of web design and it's restrictions. It's the old IT tech vs. Graphic Designer problem - the subject of many many meetings.

Can we see some examples of one that works?