Nav bar background image specs

["digitect" <digitect mindspring com>]

Two questions:

1.
I was going to pre-process some of the nav bar background images I've
been finding. No flattening, effects or exact cropping, just assembling
some high color strips that could be refined at a later date.

Joakim, since you did the original comp, do you have any notion about
height and widths for these? I don't want to cut them up to the precise
size yet, but the proportion is generally important.

I'm assuming the left side cell has the image, and the right side (or
middle and right) cells have some sort of stretched image/background
color beneath the links to make up the rest of the table width. How wide
would the image be before those started?

I'd also be curious about initial thoughts on how to overlap the
background, the text links, and the gnome toe. I'm guessing the toe is
part of the image so that the text can be right justified. But then
there's got to be some sort of a cell split so that the left-hand half
of the image can remain proportional while the right-hand stretches to
fill. In the comps, it also seems the links need to start a new cell,
too, but at a different place than the image splice. Does anyone have an
elegant solution to this short of some fancy interplay of document
background image, table background image, and a CSS z-index thing?

2.
Were we still looking at the possibility of dynamically delivering these
images? Each visit to the site could be fresh, even if each section had
a simple recognizable theme (content or color) to govern what was
delivered and assist the site maintainers.

I also like how this expresses the flexibility built into the GNOME
desktop. We could do clever things like have Grayscale week, Cartoon
week, theme to any holiday or season, or re-theme around a new release.

Not that I'm proposing we start out with a million images, or even more
than one per section for now. But it would be good to build this
flexibility into the delivery system for enhancements down the road.


Steve  [ digitect mindspring com ]