Domo-kun
Do you know Domo-kun? He is a cute mascot of NHK's BS2. The other day, I found an interesting passage from the Internet. That is "Domo-Kun acquired his name when his friend, Usajii turns on the TV for him and an announcer says "Domo konnnichiwa"("very much Hello"). " Have you known how to Domo-kun acquired his name? Isn't it interesting?
Alright, let me tell you something about frames, a technology which has a very few justifyable or interesting applications but which in 99.9% of all cases is a nuisance that renders web pages ugly and hard to use.
The principle is simply that frames allow you to divide the screen into several areas. Each of these areas is in fact a separate html page, and all pages (two or more) that are part of a frameset are stacked in such a way that you can only access the topmost page of the stack, the "frame", as it were: all other pages are "framed" within the topmost page of the stack.
The site Masami linked to, http://domokun.cjb.net, is buried in a frameset: click on any of the navigation links and you will notice that the address always remains the same: http://domokun.cjb.net.
Why is that? Or rather: why did the authors do that? Simple answer: they wanted a simple URL. The Domo-kun pages really live at this address: http://projects.morphxtech.com/Domo/. That's not an address that's very easy to remember. The authors could have registered a domain name such as, well, Domo-kun.net, but that would have cost money. Instead, they chose to use the free "URL redirection service" of cjb.net. That "service" (a dis-service to most users), of course, consists in providing an invisible frame into which other pages can be loaded: the URL becomes easier to remember, but the individual pages lose their distinct URL, and you cannot link to them any more. Annoying!
What can you do if you want to link to a page in a frameset? Pull that page out of the frameset! Say you want to link to the image page on the Domo-kun site: place your mouse pointer on the "images" link and then look at the status bar at the bottom of your browser (the status bar may be turned off in your browser: turn it on, it's an important tool!): the status bar will show you the "real" URL of the page, so type that address into the browsers address bar and – bingo! there you are! In this case: http://projects.morphxtech.com/Domo/images/images.htm.
Note, by the way, that the people who run that Domo-kun site violate NHK's copyright on the Domo-kun character. Legally, you cannot simply take somebody's material and redistribute it.
I liked the site you linked very much! I didn't know about Domo-kun in detail, and I'm surprised to see that the Japanese mascot Domo-kun is so minutely introduced abroad. His color brown is like the color of beef stew which is his favorite, isn't it?
Beef stew? Looks like a piece of carpet to me. :-)
Domo-kun is a web phenomenon, actually. Go to Google's advanced search, limit your search results to English and search for "Domo-kun": you will get about 4,900 search results, which is pretty crazy.
Domo-kun is big in America!
Why? I'm fairly sure it started on Fark, an American humour site with plenty of weird links and Photoshop contests. Click on the links where it says "Photoshop": these are threads where somebody suggests an image and then everybody starts "remixing" it in their image editors (such as Photoshop or the GIMP, which is free), i.e. changing it into something different. I think Domo-kun's popularity started as a Fark Photoshop contest, though I'm not quite sure. Does anyone want ot research this?
Whenever I saw Dono-kun on TV, I wanted to know about him. Why does he have such a shape? What creature is he? I thought that Domo-kun was a creature made of stone, because of his color. I was happy to get to learn something about him.
Daijirou-kun :: April 17, 2003 01:43 AM
I know little about Domo-kun and have never seen him on TV yet, unfortunately. But I like him when I visit the site you recommend. Though I saw him on the image page, I don't think he is cute. He looks rather fearful. Do you think he is cute?