The Mondrian Machine (via forty.something) is more than just a cool web toy that allows you to create your own neoplasticist art. It is also an interesting illustration of the capabilities of Opera 7‘s new DHTML engine. The toy works by using JavaScript to alter the structure of the web page after it has been rendered to your screen. Opera 6 can’t handle this, but Opera 7 just breezes through it without a problem. Sweet.
On a completely different note, “Mondrian” is the English spelling of the artist’s surname (“Mondriaan”). When an English speaker pronounces “Mondrian” the “a” is long. If a Dutch speaker pronounces that spelling, the “a” is short, and it would sound something like “Mondree-uhn”. The long “a” sound in Dutch is represented by the digraph “aa”. To illustrate this, check Google. When you search for “Mondriaan”, most of the top search results (18,800 pages in total) are in Dutch. If you search on “Mondrian”, you get predominantly English pages (103,000 of them).
What baffles me, though, is why his first name doesn’t seem to have undergone a similar anglicization. A typical English speaker hearing a Dutch speaker pronounce “Piet” would spell it “Pete”. So why hasn’t he become “Pete Mondrian”?
Linguistic drift. Gotta love it.