I finally got down to getting personas installed on my machine. Honestly, I do not understand what the hype was about. It's nice, alright, but is that all? Just an image to display on top of the window and another one to display on the bottom? I sort of expected something like skins we all know from X-Window System widget sets, where at least all window backgrounds are changed.
Yet, skinning the red panda opens one interesting possibility, that as far as I know hasn't been researched much yet. How about making your web-page follow the mood of your browser? Or the other way round, your browser, following the mood of your webpage? As far as I can say, none of these are implemented in personas. I expect the second one might be considered a security threat, because if I understand correctly the header and the footer image can actually be html with some javascript in it. Or am I wrong?
Anyway, I can see personas firing a DOM event to a freshly loaded web-page, telling the page what the currently selected persona is, allowing the page to react. The only problem is that there are too many personas for a web-page to implement. Perhaps there might be a way how to allow a web-page use a local resource - a persona-related background image. Web-page will thus indirectly access the viewer's hard-drive. Here we are back to security threats.
(...might be continued...)
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