Some said that frames, an innovation from the labs at NCSA Mosaic, were and abomination, akin to the devil’s possession of HTML. I never agreed, and found them quite clever, which maybe just proves my susceptibility to satanic interpolations. You don’t see a lot of straight <frame> usage anymore but the <iframe>, a Microsoft derivation of the original frame spec, has become a staple in ad serving and embedded media content.
Frames Madness
The original URL for this photo-montage masterpiece was http://sorabji.com/babel/ad0^sal;cL/. It seems modern browsers, or at least the Opera browser, no longer accept semi-colons in URLs, or if there is a way to make that work on the Apache side the issue is not enough of a concern for me to tackle. Browsers used to take semi-colonic URLs, though I don’t remember what year this set of photos posted or when that might have changed. Before changing the URL to its present https://sorabji.com/babel/ad0^salcL/ the Opera web browser at hand returned a “Forbidden” error.
The photos are low-key but ambitious, maybe a little lonely, at least by my estimate. Most of them came from a Canon ELPH APS camera, which I purchased with a belief that the relatively new format of APS represented the future of point and shoot photography. APS did not survive, another victim of digital photography’s tsunami that may never fully engulf film but which lists among its casualties more specialized formats like APS.
I have a fondness for the “PLAYPEN” photo, on 8th Avenue near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The wash of red makes the place look far more tantalizing than it is. I also have made an occasional return visit to “THE PRICE OF GAS” at a nearby Getty station, which is now Lukoil. The Empire State Building photo became poignant years later, when I took the exact same photo at a time when one might have been fooled into thinking the clouds of smoke billowing from the World Trade Center were just regular clouds.
The /babel/ directory at sorabji.com also contained a few CGI-scripted games, like blackjack and chess, scripts I did not write but customized heavily, and which were pretty damn popular and got a lot of players for a long time. I would restore them but the code base of those games goes back to 2002 and who the hell knows what security vulnerabilities they might present in modern times.
