Creative and Technical Portfolio

The General - an Iridescent shark. Mislabeled by appearance, in fact this is actually a kind of freshwater catfish. And skittish, too.

Scott Schiller

Web Developer, DJ, Fish enthusiast

This portfolio showcases work in the technical, creative and professional fields.

This can be considered a preliminary version of the site in progress. (Hint: That part means it's not done yet!)

Thanks for the interest

It appears this work has been noticed by several different sites.

Thank-you to everyone who has written in with comments, compliments and questions - I have enjoyed talking to various people about the script, late nights and coffee involved in the development thus far of this thing - your questions and feedback are appreciated as always.

A note on XMLHTTP support

This site has been designed to render on 5th-generation+ browsers, with the current exception of those that do not support the XMLHTTP object.

With XMLHTTP, content can be dynamically loaded from a remote source and parsed client-side, etc., allowing loading of content without changing URLs. (Google's Gmail, for example, uses this.)

In this case, HTML content is retrieved and displayed in this window when you click on any of the navigation items. However, browsers that don't support XMLHTTP end up following the link and loading the unstyled content itself - not a very pretty result (and a temporary shortcoming of this design.)

Bookmarks are also a consideration, but "permalinks" can easily be provided in the dynamically-provided content. Though not entirely intuitive, bookmarks can be made from the left nav items themselves.


The coming fix

A "content framework" will be added that will provide fully qualified, templated URLs for each different section of the site. However until then, browsers like Opera will see unstyled inner content when trying to browse. My bad. :)

Browsers supporting XMLHTTP

Opera is the single largest "missing link" at this point. However, the "content framework" will compensate for this.

My primary experimental site uses this technique already, providing dynamic content and graceful degradation. Refer to the Site Colophon entry on Schillmania.com for further explanation.


General Warning

Under IE:win32 this page may crash due to a JS/ActiveX bridge - though it has not surfaced for a while.