cogdogblog

Note: CogDogBlog has a new WordPress powered home at http://cogdogblog.com/. All entries from this version have been moved there, so as a guide dog service try finding this article in its new home by title search.

Happy 50th, DNA

Wow, actually I thought the 2003 Double Helix Celebrations site would be a "good dog."

After all, a historical look at the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's discovery of the DNA double helix structure, should be a gold mine.

And the site does provide some good references, and a copy of the April 25, 2953 paper by Watson and Cirick published in Nature. And there is a "interactive" genetics timeline, could be of use somewhere.

But this cleanly appearing site, good color scheme amd element placement, to me, falls down on its Flash delivery. View image

I just about spit every time I load a page in the site, where I have to watch the same elements slide in, fade in and out. As I sometimes mutter in presentations, some people animate everything in Flash for the same reason dogs can lick themselves.

And the text of the site, although appearing as selectable text in a scrolling window (well you can highlight it with your mouse), is not copy/paste enabled for transferring a chunk elsewhere. Okay, this may "protect" the content from wholesale copy/paste, but it makes it darn frustrating to select a portion to do womthing like write a annotation (or blog) a chunk for a web site.

And the DNA related Art is one item.

So, have a great birthday, Mr Double Helix, but save us from Flash bottled content.

And stop that unnecessary animation.