Paradise - Responsive Design w/CSS3

Destinations Discussion

I have been wanting to visit beautiful tropical islands practically all my life, but never had the means or money to afford a trip. Recently with some good employment opportunities and by adopting a work ethic that might compete well with a migrant farmer in the middle growing of season, I have been able to save and sponsor a few trips to some amazing places. This set of pages describes a few of the destinations and my opinions about each of them. Included are some details about a few excursions I was able to go on and how they accented the trip.

In this way as opposed to a critque of each location, look at these descriptions as one of many possible ways in which that destination could be enjoyed. It might not be the same experience that you have while you are there, but it is my honest portrayal of my own visit. In my sliding scale of judgement a location fails to live up to its full potential, if when I go there I do not find a good place to surf, or feel it is not safe to do so. I am not the best travel arranger or surfer, so in the end it is really quite easy for a place to fail or fall off my chart all together. However I did manage to find a place to surf at near Cabo San Lucas once, so I would not say that I am not willing to take risks to get where I want to go (ie. to the surf).

What I Found

Kauai was definitely the best trip that I have ever been on. Staying in Kauai was like floating in a remote vacation wonderland, everything about the trip made me feel like I was tip toeing around in paradise. From a bit of snorkelling with the fishes, to travelling to a remote wild/deserted beach. Whether it was a helicopter ride around the island or hiking up to a natural waterfall and pool, I have never seen such amazing purity of environment, or amazingly enjoyable and liveable surroundings.

The Dominican Republic was also a real sight to behold however and just going there was like opening up a long deserted but very well preserved sociological tomb. While the climate and surroundings are very beautiful, the people and culture appeared to either be lost in yester year, or not quite able to compete in a way that provides equal opportunity for all citizens (Making this trip full of joy as well as sorrow.).

On Oahu I stayed in Waikiki which felt like a large vacation city on a beach. That is perfectly fine if you love cities, but the beauty of the beach seemed quite lost in it all. Looking on the bright side you were never far away from a corner store in Waikiki and everything you could want to enjoy your stay was immediately accessible.

Transform

You can find various example of this CSS3 property online. The above animations were found on the CodePen website in an effort to provide iconic symbols to vaguely describe the process of vacation comparison. As you can see the property is quite powerful. If you have looked at the code of various other HTML5 related HTML5/canvas animations and demos, you will see the property values that are listed to the right, are quite similar to the OpenGL transformation functions listed in such works. This provides for some very powerful primitive functions for rendering a web page. Essentially your imagination is the limit, so have a read.

The CSS3 'transform' property allows you to perform all sorts of OpenGL related transformation on aspects of the objects that CSS3 can provide. The border and border-radius properties can be used to make shapes. The transform property can provide for 2D and 3D alterations of the elements. For instance:

move/translate
rotate
scale
move
skew
perspective
matrix based transformations

Multicolumn

The multicolumn functionality of CSS3 requires some work to perfect. You can find various example of this CSS3 property online. The above gif image we have displayed here is from a site that gives you a very good example concerning how to use the property. As the example shows the best way to use the new property is to make use of it with an article element. However we initially tried to make use of it inside a section element, attempting to make two columns out of a pair of article elements (see the Oahu page). This caused very different results depending on which browser was used. Our reasoning here is that we floated article sections to the left/right to make columns using CSS2 so it was natural to try to substitute this mechanism with the new functionality (We would not advise this.).

In the bottom half of this page we have made proper use of the columns property to define the number of columns to use and the minimum width for the columns as defined in our original example link. There are definitely still issues with perhaps the elegance as you can see here. Including the Header/Title inside the article element fails to distinctly separate the title from from the content of that article, however like any work improvements can still be made. Obviously what we have here is much better than our initial attempts. The "Kahuna City" section of the Oahu page also exhibits this functionality.