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I guess it depends on who you ask. According to Jeffrey Zeldman:

Some say this this article debunks the "myth" of the web-safe color palette. What it actually debunks is the myth that "thousands of colors" are enough. And the corollary myth, tossed about on web design lists like so much wishful thinking, that we can dispense with the web-safe color palette because "most" people have thousands of colors. Most people have brown eyes, too. Neither fact has any bearing on the web-safe color palette.

I agree with Zeldman. The websafe palette is still useful and I'll continue to use it.

Sure, it's frustrating waiting for Netscape 6, but I don't see how flaming Netscape for not coding fast enough will further the cause of Web Standards. I used to support WSP because I thought it was voicing valid concerns, but I'm beginning to think WSP just another publicity engine for Zeldman, whose Daily Report is written with the same royal "we" as the WSP press releases.

Well, there you have it. They are going to host web sites that intentionaly piss off France, and only France.:-) The Brits will conveniently find some excuse to extend their defenses to the Sealanders who have ancestral links back to the old homeland. But there is still the Germans to consider as one of Zeldman's Failed Ads attests to.

But I'm still left with a very very bad taste in my mouth, to think that someone leaves webpages up that look horrid in the browsers of 25% of all the people who view them (unless they have javascript turned ON), and yet will crash that same 25% of all the people that try and view them (unless they have Javascript turned OFF).

I'm using Netscape 4.61 on Win98, I have most advertisers in my HOSTS file aliased to 127.0.0.1(*), (and have a webserver running so pages that MUST get replies before displaying don't 'freeze' until they time out in trying), and I keep Javascript turned off most of the time so that sites whose ads 'redirect' to 404 pages when an ad isn't available, don't. Thus when I went to see his 'steal' webpage, my browser crashed. Thanks. Thanks a lot buddy. I don't need you to remind me that Netscape and Microsoft products suck. You've simply pissed me off at you yourself.

I don't use IE because of it's secuirty hell, and because it's "favorites" management sucks ass, nor Opera because it isn't free (beer) and doesn't (or didn't) do everything needed, nor do I 'upgrade' to 4.63 or 4.7 because, well, "upgrading" is a pain and risky with almost all products.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not holding him fully responsible for how bad his site looks in my setup. I spread the blame everywhere appropriate. I hate the guts of Netscape and Microsoft (well, especially their consumer OS division) and most of the people who have made a large portion of the software I've ever used as well.

Sign me - Mad as hell at almost everyone.

(*) I didn't get around to 'aliasing into nullspace' all the advertisers until I got pissed off at being forced to wait for slow ads before pages would display.

Thanks, those are great..

Geez, between that, LostBrain, ModernHumorist and others I've spent way too much time laughing this week.

Loved your work on the " Batman Forever " and " Batman & Robin " movie websites. Rumor has it that Warner Bros is buying up all variations of "Batman: Year One" (Rumored to be the next movie)...

Will you and the same design team work on that one, or is it too soon to tell?

Not just one, either. For example, on http://www.zeldman.com/about/aboutf.html , you say "You need a frames-capable browser, buster". Well that's great... but I have one (Lynx). If you'd label your frames in a sensible manner, though, I wouldn't have to pick one at random ("content" would have been so much better that "mid"). As it is, I went for "bot" first, which took me to http://www.zeldman.com/about/bot.html, a prime example of what (for me, at least) is the cardinal sin of web design -- no alt attributes for images.

Not just one, either. For example, on http://www.zeldman.com/about/aboutf.html , you say "You need a frames-capable browser, buster". Well that's great... but I have one (Lynx). If you'd label your frames in a sensible manner, though, I wouldn't have to pick one at random ("content" would have been so much better that "mid"). As it is, I went for "bot" first, which took me to http://www.zeldman.com/about/bot.html, a prime example of what (for me, at least) is the cardinal sin of web design -- no alt attributes for images.

Cool stuff on GeekPress: How to Hack a Bank / Helmet o'Death, Almost

-- Diana Hsieh

Amen. The prevailing direction of web design, and HTML standards, has been away from the original concept of HTML. IIRC (can't find a link at the moment), the manner of display was supposed to be determined by the browser. Fer example, according to Zeldman, you can now turn off link underlining. This is the reverse of the underline tag, but is just as bad. Isn't a document's utility as hypertext subverted if linked text isn't identifiable? This also subverts the user preferences (underlining is settable in Netscape). Style sheets and JavaScript also contribute to this problem. Why is this a good thing, Mr Zeldman?

He already answered this question in his website, just for curiosity. People can now moderate this question down. :)

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I think there's too much concern on the web with form over content. Slashdot is a prime example, this is not the optimal form, but nevertheless they provide enough entertaining, timely, and relevant content that they have tons and tons of ridiculously loyal readers. This is because, of course, the best content is the sum of the users themselves, which /. achieves perfectly.
And I think orange is ugly, so I don't dig zeldman's site. It's just too bright

Here's some content for ya, if you care about your feedom at all, vote for Ralph Nader!
And is he really a great web designer? He has a broken link right on the front page... http://www.zeldman.com/orson.html is what the "if movies had been websites" points to. And the mozilla link is broken too.

What we need is a daily page done by an AI personality, now that'll be cool



___________________________
Michael Cardenas
http://www.fiu.edu/~mcarde02
http://www.deneba.com/linux

Quoting from his own website: "If your design demands a specific height, set it in points (not pixels)"

Which brings me to my question:

What percentage of your development time do you spend on testing your sites?

Someday (hopefully within a couple months) I may have to deal with the slashdot effect, with my Homebrew MP3 player project, which is open source, but at the moment only in a just barely working state.

My question, specifically from your recent experience, is how should one deal with the slashdot effect, knowing that is coming.