Subject: Re: [ANSAX-L] Junius 11 notwithstanding . . .
From: Roy Liuzza <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:22:03 -0400

Pat, Britt, Nicole, et al.,

	This discussion has led me to dig out my copy of the Junius 11  
electronic facsimile and give it another try -- it hadn't worked so  
well for me either when I first got it, but I'd used it in the past  
just as a sort of repository for images, and had loaded individual  
pages to read introductions and commentaries and so on. I hadn't tried  
to actually start from the "Start Here" page in a long time.

	The images and introduction are, needless to say, very useful and  
very well done, and we should all be grateful to Bernard Muir for the  
outstanding work he's doing on this and other electronic projects. It  
does seem a shame, though, that many users can't see the whole project  
in the format the software creators intended.

	Mac users now have several options for running PC software --  
Parallels, Fusion, and one other one I've forgotten. None of these  
requires rebooting or partitioning or anything of that sort; you just  
start Parallels, then -- disconcertingly -- the Windows Song plays and  
the green, eerily barren landscape of the Windows Desktop appears;  
after a few minutes fending off software updates and helpful offers to  
clean up your desktop, you can launch Internet Explorer for Windows  
(or any other PC program you have on hand) and do whatever needs to be  
done. For a Mac purist like me, it's a bit distasteful, but we live in  
an imperfect world and sometimes you have to make compromises. Still,  
the Junius facsimile has ended up being, for me, a bit like the  
Microfiche Facsimile series -- useful but not convenient.

	I think the problem for Mac users may be that the main menu of the  
Junius 11 CD is made with Shockwave or something like that; if it were  
more simply coded -- perhaps if the designer hadn't tried to make the  
interface look like a video game -- it would probably run on any  
browser or operating system.

	Is there not a template or model for electronic facsimiles that might  
help editors achieve some basic layout that adheres more closely to  
web standards? Every editor out there seems to be reinventing the idea  
of an electronic presentation of MS images, and much of what has been  
produced seems kind of over-designed and visually unfriendly. I am  
probably not the only person who would be satisfied with much simpler  
interfaces and menus if it meant I could reliably open the edition in  
my usual browser.

	I should probably be paying more attention to the Digital Medievalist  
list. I'll bet they've had this discussion four or five times by now.

	- RML

___________________
R.M. Liuzza
Department of English
301 McClung Tower
The University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430
(office) 865-974-6970
(fax) 865-974-6926
(email) [email-masked]
(URL) http://web.utk.edu/~rliuzza/

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