Matthew Levine’s article “In Search of the Holy Grail” on A List Apart offers a straight-forward way to incorporate a three column layout for web designers with lean code, minimal CSS, and a consistent code order, heretofore a sloppy and difficult task. Levine makes a very interesting point in his article that is excerpted below:
Three columns. One fixed-width sidebar for your navigation, another for, say, your Google Ads or your Flickr photos and, as in a fancy truffle, a liquid center for the real substance. Its wide applicability in this golden age of blogging, along with its considerable difficulty, is what has earned the layout the title of Holy Grail.
His linking the importance of the three column layout with the blog suggests the immediate impact of this web-based publishing software’s digital format. The above lines may be read as an acknowledgment that the aesthetic of virtual space is, in many ways, adopting the blog as a prototype for the look, feel, and logic driving the web of tomorrow.
It is fascinating to witness blogs shape the virtual aesthetic in much the same ways that monolithic films like Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Blade Runner formed our understanding of what the the future might look like at different moments throughout the last century. Are blogs, and other digital media like them, beginning to replace the importance of film in shaping our ability to imagine a futuristic aesthetic? – a reality further compounded by the fact that Hollywood’s production quality this year may be the worst ever? Well, there is always Hong Kong … and media blogs!!!
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