Web Graphics: Art on the Net

Mark Harden, texas.net Museum of Art

Limited technical capability/resources

In addition to personal constraints, there have been limitations in terms of resources. When I created "The First Impressionist Exhibition, 1874" in December, 1995, I did not have access to CGI scripts for an image map. I resorted to slicing the photograph of Nadar's studio into six separate images, each of which is linked to its respective artist's section. The development of Client Side Image Maps has been a welcome relief, allowing much more graphical navigation in the interface of the site.

Ongoing resource constraints include, most importantly, the lack of a search capability, which is a serious shortcoming of the site. A workaround would be to provide an expanded image interface, one that might display artist listings by school, or works by genre, etc., but this leads inexorably back to time constraint. Bandwidth has become another resource limitation. Not a constraint in terms of download time, as I expect visitors to be willing to wait for a 200kb JPG of their favorite painting, but as far as the hosting of the images. The growing popularity of the site recently resulted in the loss of the educational institution server where the images were being stored. This extremely fast server was nevertheless being swamped by downloads of more than 300GB per month. The images have now been moved to a commercial server, which, although allowing unlimited downloads, has a much slower access speed.

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