The mystery of the navbar

#1

Look at this website. The content is strange, and there may be some valid concern about my descent into mad corners of the internet. Don’t mind that.

Scroll to the bottom of the page. There is a navbar which has links to other parts of the website. But look closely. Try to use it.

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It’s not a set of links. It’s a picture!!

Look at the other pages. The navbars are all different pictures!!!

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So why?!? It is much easier to make the navbar in html than it is to make them pictures. In fact, if you wanted to make them pictures, you would almost certainly want to make it in html first and screenshot it.

Is it intentional? What message is it meant to convey? Simply confusion?
Or it is unintentional, terrible design? (much like the rest of the website). But how?? How would you even create these pictures, microsoft paint?? And how could you think that this was the right way to do it?

The website has an article reporting the death of the webmaster, so the secrets of the navbar may be forever lost to time. :disappointed:

#2

Is it possible they were links and they’ve been unlinked so they’re unclickable now?

#3

No, it’s literally an image. It is so ridiculous it seems it must be intentional.

Here is some additional findings:

  1. The images are transparent.
  2. The images have different sizes (in both dimensions!)
  3. The images are gifs
  4. The images have names like image1391.gif, image751.gif, image1898.gif

The first means they are not screenshots. Screenshots can’t be transparent. Screenshotting and then deleting the white background would probably leave aliasing.

The second disqualifies making them in an image editor like paint or photoshop. Surely you would make them all at once by taking a base image and modifying it. Why would the dimensions change? And why would they all be different?? One possibility is cropping. Perhaps the base image was too big and then they were haphazardly cropped afterwards.

The third and fourth are curious but it’s difficult to draw any conclusions…

#4

did Pierre Beaudry die or is it just Lyndon Larouche who did? Isn’t it Beaudry’s website?

#5

Also maybe they were links on an older version of the website and rather than do all the hard of making links again on the new site they just took pictures of all the old navbars and plopped em on the bottom.

#6

also have you tried sending a message asking about it on the contact me part of the last page, under axiom busting?

#7

The webmaster and Lyndon are different people but they both died recently. Pierre is alive but I’m hesitant to contact him because he’s a bit crazy. Don’t worry about that.

Anyway, I’ve solved the mystery. It’s not nearly as exciting as I hoped. :confused:

They are using really old school and shitty web design. In modern (and smart) design, you would build the navbar using individual buttons and style all of them to make it look consistent. On this website, both navbars are actually entire pictures with regions defined as clickable. They just forgot to mark regions as clickable in the bottom navbar.

Here is a question from a web developer in 2009 asking about how to make such a system work. The answer, even in 2009, was that this was stupid and shouldn’t be done. The website seems to be made in Microsoft word…

#8

Wow well I’m glad we’ve solved The Great Mystery Of The Navbar.

1 Like
#9

This has been quite a ride. I’ve been invisibly (visibly? can administrators see page views?) watching from the sidelines to some extent, and I’m glad an answer has been reached.

Is the site itself worthwhile? The amount of content seems a bit overwhelming. If you would recommend it, are things best perused in order? Are there any parts that are “must reads”?

#10

I wouldn’t recommend reading any of it. I’ll make a post eventually on the cult that he is a part of. I think they have better material to start with.