Slashdot Mirror
Interview: Lynda Weinman
Andy King writes: "We interview the design diva herself, Lynda Weinman. This wide-ranging
talk sheds light on Lynda's work and teaching, her humble beginnings,
and where she thinks Web design is headed." Mostly good, sensible advice -- though not incontrovertable. (Not everyone believes in using tables to control the layout of text, for instance.) Weinman's advice is down-to-earth, and worth reading for anyone who wants to make Web sites functional and aesthetically pleasing.
Presumably because she cares about typography, and there's no way in hell that a markup language is going to give you the control of appearance that you need to do anything interesting with design.
all the bad web designers I've ever met are the product of books and bad teachers. The best web designers from personal experience the last four years are all self taught and never read a single book. With that in mind, I've look at few of her books. the content is there, but there is no substitute for careful observation and self-motivation. the key to good web design is more about keeping an open mind than reading a book.
You guessed right. See the w3c for all your HTML specification needs. Personally, it's the only place I go for answers on HTML questions. If it's not in the spec, it's not worth my time.
The current version is HTML 4.01
Or you can glance at the previous version, HTML 4.0
I've known people who were self-taught from books who have very good design skills. Granted, if you take Laura Lemay or Lynda Weimann as the web design gospel, you'll get in trouble. On the other hand, I started out with the NCSA tutorial, picked up some of the better things in some of the books available, and adjusted my style such that my site were easier to view and use.
I admit to being a format freak, but that's self-taught. I know other people who are the same way. Bottom line--just because someone learned HTML from a book doesn't mean that their sites will suck. My web design philosophy can be found on my "Please hire a graduating college student" page at my thoughts page on the site.
Who am I?
Why am here?
Where is the chocolate?
What is your Slash Rating?
Actually, I still think the "magic 'O' word" in this case is "Open standards", but the other two 'words' are required to ensure that.
:)
However, Open Source goes a long way to helping out the other three goals: if you can simply recompile, or patch the source, what could be more open and friendly than that? It's additional and optional, and programmer-friendly. No one else should care, except that they might get an enhanced product out of the deal. But we'll see how Netscape 6 is soon enough...
But I was just sharing a quote I found interesting, that raised my opinion of Lynda, who I had never heard of before. And as no one else commented on it before me, could someone kindly explain how I'm "Redundant" too?
I also thought the guy posting to explain that this wasn't a "Slashdot Interview" candidate was being very helpful, and I think he got moderated down for his troubles. Do I not get moderator access because they know I won't moderate down the good posts? No, really, I'd like a reply, preferably from the people who moderate down on this thread.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Wow. My nemesis, thy name is gargle.
Even if a post doesn't contribute to the discussion, *or* if you don't like it, it isn't redundant unless it's been said. And in this case, it seriously wasn't offtopic, since people were *still* posting interview questions! I would moderate it as "Informative".
A warning like that needs to be at the top, so people don't waste their time writing questions that won't be answered, and seriously don't waste their time flaming other people who write the questions...
I know how people get mod points, but I have yet to see the logic in the system. I've been reading slashdot a lot less lately, but I'm sure I'm not an average user, or whatever they're looking for.
From what I've read thus far, I like Lynda because she seems to understand the realities of the situation while still hoping for a real solution.
You must realize that web sites would be much more usable and aesthetically pleasing if they worked the same way, on all web browsers? Like maybe if I didn't have to see unsupported character codes in HTML that only work in Windows/IE5 for some reason? Hmm? I wonder why that happens...
And for the record, I didn't say a damn thing about "Open Source", she did, and you did. I liked the quote, and was surprised I found it there, amid all the web newbie tool talk, and thought the Slashdot community might find it interesting. I also mentioned the other web design points I was interested in from the article, which you chose to ignore.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm. I browsed that page in lynx, and didn't have a problem figuring it out. The left frame was "menu", since lynx supports frames. (and it should, since frames finally made it into the spec--are there any major browsers that don't support frames anymore?)
;)
I would have preferred tables because I still think frames are evil, but okay. (On Lynda's main page, she's got a kewl script that breaks out of frames.
I know why people use graphics that are simply text. If there were a good, standard way to give everyone the same fonts, we could just use that. But there isn't, not really.
Lynx also shows the names of the images in the links, and these images are all named consistently. The ALT text would be exactly the same, except without the ".gif". w3m goes one better, and just shows the names, and that they are images.
Sure, these are technically errors, but please explain to me who would run into them? Someone using Mosaic with image loading turned off? Please. It isn't great, sure, but it isn't a "monstrosity".
However, you're right, someone doesn't know how to write HTML, was in a hurry, or hacked a pre-existing page. You should never have a closing body without a starting body tag, and frames don't need a starting body tag, so...
But even with all that, these pages look fine in most any browser, AFAICT. Isn't that the point?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I am probably wasting my time on yet another ignorant "web designer", but here goes..
/mill
HTML is designed to be universally accessible. That means the information can be accessed on your fancy PC, a PDA, or by a blind person using a braille terminal. What you are asking for is to piss on those that don't have the necessary hardware to render your "design" or even worse they _can't_ because of their disability.
I know, "I am not targetting blind people. They are not interested in what I am doing." yada yada. I am sure if you, or your children, lose your eye sight then you will lose all interest in your previous life too (or if you are blind you don't deserve a life at all or at the least you should be sent somewhere where you can't bother us real people). Umm, yeah, that seems likely.
The "funny" thing is that the people that had the most to gain from WWW (all those who couldn't read the newspaper because it wasn't available in Braille or on tape) are constantly being screwed over by the likes of YOU. Yes, lets use PDF all of us so that we can really shut them out.
Once again. You people make me sick.
Maybe. Maybe you are right. Or it could be that I am just disgusted by the ignorance shown by "web designers".
/mill
Just because because you can park in the handicap space doesn't mean you should. Just because you can screw those that had the most to gain from WWW over doesn't mean you should. Even if it means you have a shorter walk to the mall or a way to copy the paper media - verbatim.
If my web page doesn't please your eyes you can always use your own client side style sheet. One can't make up for abuse of HTML by "web designers" though.
Funny thing is the uproar that occurs here each time Linux users are shut out from something and then in the next moment they are perfectly content with screwing blind users (or whoever) over. I, as a Debian Linux user, can at any time go to the store and get Win* instead. A blind person can't buy a new pair of eyes.
IMO, nothing wrong with Perl/CGI, if the server can handle it. Frames and the like will go away as CSS gets support (ie, Mozilla - as she puts it, open standard, open source, cross-platform). Although, big companies have a history of not 'getting it' very fast - I say 2005 they realize you need more than a graphic designer or a programmer, you need someone who's both, and about 2010 before they actually get something worthwhile. Of course, those are based on rough estimates of technology acceptance, from what I can estimate in my head. It'll probably take much longer :)
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
I run my own web design company, I wouldn't hire her based on what I see of her work on Linda.com. The colors are garish and the text is hard to read against the backdrop. On top of all that, when you click on a link (tips), the left navigation bar goes away. Rule #1 of web design is consistency.
She is no expert. I would like to see an interview with the folks at WebPagesThatSuck.com. At least they are up front about what works and doesn't, and they tell you.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
And did you notice that "webreference.com" isn't mentioned in the Slashdot article and that Andy King doesn't lead to "Andrew King, Managing Editor (aking@internet.com)", it only leads to the WebReference mainpage, and he didn't start the story by saying,"We here at WebReference interview the design diva herself, Lynda Weinman.", he just says we. timothy should have caught and fixed that.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
You ain't never heard of the BR tag?
That wouldn't work, unless you were using a monospace font. Pre-wrapping non-monospace text is a horrendously bad idea, because you end up with an extremely ragged right margin.
My opinion: don't try to force it to be narrower. If users really find it hard to read the long lines of text, they can resize their browser window.
If you
try and
force it
you'll
just tick
people
off when
they have
to read
text
that's
all
squished
against
the left
side of
their
browser
window
like this.
I think meat contains some chemicals which support one's sense of humor, because you certainly have lost some of yours... Unless you've never actually had it. :)
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I am also a follower of the "semantic HTML" religion. However, when you say, "For slashdot to give this woman credence as an "expert" is truly shameful.", you must be forgetting what the default Slashdot page looks like in the first place. Sure, at least /. doesn't use a fixed width column for the main content. But the pages are so bloated (and poorly designed, sorry Rob/Jeff), that I've been using /. in "light mode" for about a year now.
If the article posted was critical of Weinman's advice, then there would be something to say. As I see it, the comment is entirely consistent with /.'s design philosophy.
Maybe she's an expert, but has anyone running Linux actually visited Lynda.com? Can you read anything on this page without a loupe?
This is another case of One-Os-Design. Sorry, but I can't take advice from someone who obviously doesn't care about cross-platform compability. Not everyone is running MS Windos, you know...
tom
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
Colour choice: go for contrast any time. I prefer dark backgrounds with light text, too, and find (for example) standard M$loth-produced black-on-bright-white painful to think about.
You've made the right decision, but for some reason, it seems most "designers" do not seem to want to do this. We went over this issue in my User Interface grad course, dark backgrounds with light text are better for the human eye(it's been proven), but people want to imitate paper for some reason !!!BTW - Good advice in all the other areas.
- sigs are for wimps.
SUV-driving and earth-loving are not compatible. Maybe electric car-driving and earth-loving.....
And vegetarian's snobs? Hah!!!!!!! I've been one for eight years and am treated like a freak/misguided fool constantly by flesh-eaters. It gets very old.
Not so much Diva as Prima Donna, perhaps?
(( Colour choice: go for contrast any time. I prefer dark backgrounds with light text, too, and find (for example) standard M$loth-produced black-on-bright-white painful to think about. ))
Yes, black on white is painful, but it is better than the blue on black I see all too often. The amount of pages with crazy backgrounds I see never fails to amaze. Another tip for those people: teal text on a gray background with a dark image is fine until the image disappears or fails to load. Then I kiss the illegible page goodbye. personally, the user has the power to change the colour to what he/she wants in options. But, at your suggestion, I changed my page (by swapping 2 things in one .css file) and everything is different. I expect everbody to access my pages with either a gui browser or with lynx. either way, it's white on black.
I open new windows when a user clicks on an outside link. But only one. I use the Target property to open to "_", which replaces content in that one window instead of one each.
I'm not a big fan of multiple images, as I prefer to do things with type. Sometimes I wished you could build all your "fancier" (layers and the like) text within the css borders, never to render in plaintext (or to render differently).
Lowmag.net
Lynda: I have never created a Web site other than our own.
Who needs real-world experience when you can just sit on the sidelines and pontificate?
The design of lynda.com is, umm, not the worst web design I've ever seen, but it certainly isn't the best. Some of the color schemes are questionable, but no worry -- just go to another page on the site and you're sure to be treated to another color scheme entirely. Consistency is every bit as boring as all those rectangular objects that plague the web. And the site looks pretty bad in Lynx. And I can't help but raise my eyebrow at anyone who consistently capitalizes the word "Web" in the year 2000.
Oh, and thanks to whoever pointed out the poll on lynda.com about "what resolution do you design web pages for?" I can only shake my head and sigh...
Frames have always been, and will continue to be the worst design, breaking the back button, bookmarks, and just about anything else that the web was built on. Side note: I had never heard of this lady, till she was interviewed on digital village, and sadly I missed the interview. I immediately visited the site beforehand, and thought it was light on content.
Who cares? Can you read it? Then its good enough.
Damn, I bet you are the designated driver at parties too...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Hmmm, yeah. There are several considerations in the choice of colour.
:) is to take a multi-coloured backdrop and remove one colour, e.g. green, from it, and then use that as a main text colour for those bits where the font is small enough to get 'lost' in the backdrop. Then you stand back a couple of feet and if you can't read it, try again :)
;|
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I'm typing this in netscrapie on linux though and this text box is black on white, the rest of the page being grey. And this box is awful to look at.
One approach I've been playing with (and it's all too obvious from my page
As for opening new windows - please don't! I have a very serviceable middle button that does it for me, or I can right-click+"open in new window"; if I get the impression that some pages will screw up my left-click, I'll be very unhappy...
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
And btw, some of the quotes are excellent.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
I don't know if you will get to read this posting or not (I cant imagine it making the cut of questions presented to you, and I dont know if you read Slashdot regularly) but I just want to say that I think you are right on with your view of how websites should be designed. A couple years ago I bought a copy of "creative web design" and I've worn that book down considerably.
I already had a pretty decent knowlege of HTML prior to reading it though I both enjoyed reading it and learned quite a bit about topics the average web developer pays no attention to such as:
It was also a great tutorial on javascript and photoshop (after learning the concepts of using photoshop to design nicer graphics from this book I was able to take what I learned and use the GIMP ;)
If more web designers read this book, we'd have a much nicer web. I wish you (and your brother the Javascript man) the best of luck, and thank you so much for the excellent material you've provided us with!!
Bill
I hate to say this, but I think Lynda is overhyped. Yes, her books are good, I own one myself ($5.99 in the bargain bin at London Drugs!) but as a woman, I can't get over her snotty, holier than thou tone. I think she's a skilled person who kind of let her popularity in the way....that and some parts of her website haven't been updated in ages. Just MHO. Perhaps it's something that comes out in print.
*g* this is exactly what I mean in my earlier posts about Lynda being like Martha Stewart :-) a good teacher can teach, but a good student must also be able to learn and explore on his own. If you think Lynda is the be all and end all of web design...*shakes head*
*g* ugly pages - isn't that 99% of Geocities?
I suppose another thing that irks me is that when people who call themselves "artists" or "designers" make some god awful background img that everyone and their dog uses, and throws readability out the window.
I think there is so much one needs to know to build on the web. FrontPage won't make you a brilliant HTML author either. To design properly, you must know how HTML actually works, and work with the limitations of the code. Using tables for design is a pretty big hack in itself, IMHO.
There isn't any wysiwyg editor on the market that produces ready to publish html
:-)
Actually, I watched Lynda's video for Adobe Go Live the other day (my man brought it home from work) and during the few glimpses she gave of the code you could see (and I have confirmed this in person) the HTML it writes IS fairly clean and ready to go. Imagine my shock.
I write all my sites with Notepad, and even though AGL does some awesome things with mouseovers and image maps, I still prefer to have ABSOLUTE POWER over my code.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I'm willing to say he is. Okay, the colour choices are pretty hideous, but take a look at the page in your fancy-schmancy browser with stylesheets turned on. Now look at it in your fancy-schmancy browser with stylesheets turned off. Now look at it in Lynx. Now look at the source.
Those floating yellow boxes with quotes in them are just <blockquote> elements. No layout is done on a per-quote basis. Compare that to trying to acheive the same thing with tables.
In short, this page rules, and has really made me rethink the viability of doing all of your page layout with CSS.
--
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow)
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
Offtopic, but interesting.... Where does one find the exact standard? w3c.org, I'd bet... If I'm way off please post its location.
I wasn't aware an image's ALT tag was required to be html4 compliant...
"What's the most hideous use of bandwith-busting graphics that you've seen, and how do we avoid the brainless design decisions that lead us down such evil paths? :) "
:)
How to prevent it? Easy. Force every web designer to view their work... with a 56k dialup. If you can hold your breath untill the page loads, you got it right. That last part I heard someplace else, but can't remember where. It's 1:30am now and all this Natty Boh is going to my head.
One of the features most requested by web designers for Mozilla is true alpha channel support in PNGs. I personally was looking forward to this feature. Do you have any comments (possibly compelling reasons) now that mozilla has pretty much decided that won't make it in the final release?
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
Re: Perl is not the problem...
The problem with -most- perl/cgi heavy sites is when they are poorly designed - eg perl scripts all over the cgi-bin directory and lots of heavy ? get strings... If you use mod_rewrite, php or something similar it is possible to make a more friendly site by having url directories for navigation instead of cryptic get commands. Point is, the interaction with the cgi layer -is- part of the UI.
A W S ----------- QABO : BALA
Here is another Lynda Weinman Interview.
How to Download YouTube Videos
Does that mean I'm not a web developer?
Or does that mean someone is fabricating (using a ~random number generator) some hype?
Well there's one or two. She has done some valuable stuff (ie working out the 216-colour websafe palette) but these days, she seems (like Molly Holzschlag IMHO) to be more interested in promoting her books/courses.
If you actually look at her books, the newer revisions dont actually add that much new information. And once you know how to defringe, which image format is better for which kind of graphic, and how to use the 216-color palette then you don't need to purchase four different (~45 UKP) books to get the information. In fact if you read her column in Web Techniques (probably archived) then thats probably all you need to know.
But she pushes the books, and the courses, and the videos, and the DVD's. And meanwhile, sahe sticks with slightly older ways of doing things, in a kinda David Siegel stylee. Ookay, CSS isn't guaranteed cross-platform / cross-browser so its forgivable, but its slightly old-fashioned. And there isn't a lot of new graphics-oriented generic information; its devolved into books on specific software packages.
If you're interested, browse her books in Borders or summat, but don't buy. Too damned 'spensive. Get the O'Reilly book on web graphics, or read webdeveloper.com.
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
Using one right now. Opera. I have it set to white text on blue background, which I prefer. When I hit a page that sets one colour but not the other (ick) or worse yet one that sets both and makes the page totally unreadable, there's a button to disable document settings. Works great on slashdot (text is set to black, background isn't set - if my background was set to black it would be totally unreadable without override, as it is it's just not pretty ;^)
The linux port is coming right along - I can't wait. I love linux but I find myself rebooting to use the web - once you've used opera netscape just is not acceptable anymore.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Lynda: Open standards, open source, browser compatibility and cross-platform compatibility. A tall order indeed.
If she wants open standards, why is she teaching people to disregard them? If she want's compatibility, why does she teach people to write poor html and deliberately break the cross-platform compatibility that's already there?
Supporting standards and not designing pages which are browser specific is the real way to keep the market for browsers open and to keep browser technology improving.
She speaks as if things like open standards and cross platform compatibility don't exist. You seem to have bought this, and think she must be great because she wants them to. This is just bull. These things do exist - they just aren't idiot proof. Just because it is possible to write poor html, violate standards, and by doing so break compatibility doesn't mean they don't exist - it means you should learn to write proper html. Too bad Lynda declines to teach people to do this.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
However, when you say, "For slashdot to give this woman credence as an "expert" is truly shameful.", you must be forgetting what the default Slashdot page looks like in the first place.
It's true that slashdot isn't a great html example. But there is light mode (it's why I made an account in fact, now I don't have to keep typing it in, I just set it in preferences and be done) as you mention, slashdot is dynamically generated and that always makes it harder (though not impossible) to produce good html, and finally, even at it's worst, slashdot is far better than her site.
I don't follow a "semantic html religion" - I am talking about usability and portability, not the results of a validator. Mind you, I'm not saying pages shouldn't validate either, ideally they should, but I'd rather see a purely technical error on a good page than a bad page that validates. Validators will fail a page for errors that are pretty inconsequential, and pass pages that have major problems. I posted an example of the major problems on her site in this post btw - these are not picky validation errors, but major design flaws that would be easy to correct if she really cared about "open standards" and particularly "cross-platform compatibility" as she claimed in the interview.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I believe webtv doesn't (I've never used it) I am not sure about arachne, and hell one of the many reasons I like Opera is that you can (and I have) turned frames off. People still using older browsers (and there are quite a few, for various reasons) won't have frame support. Voice browsers cannot do anything useful with frames either. And I am not sure palm browsers and the like support frames either, but even if they do, the page is not likely to be readable on that small a display. However if the noframes tag were filled in properly and the alt attributes set not only would all those platforms be able to render the content appropriately - any properly written browser on any platform - including ones no one has even imagined yet, could be guaranteed to handle it properly.
Arguments that there is no need to use proper html because everyone is using one of the browsers you are familiar with it, and it isn't a problem in any of them, are firstly wrong (practically every browser you have ever heard of, and dozens more that you haven't, are still in use by somebody somewhere) but beyond that they totally miss the point. The whole idea of html is platform independence, and platform independence doesn't mean "this will work on all the common systems you might think of" it means it will work on systems that you have never imagined too. This is the beauty and the promise of HTML, and it is quite possible to fulfill, in the vast majority of cases, with very little effort. There is no good excuse not to do this, particularly when your business is web design!
I saw that too, and I don't think it's a very good idea to autoexecute that like she does. What if I want to view that page inside a frame? Why not let the user decide whether or not to activate the script? I've seen other pages do this, it's not difficult at all. As it is, if I want to view her page inside a frame I have to turn off scripting.
I know why people use graphics that are simply text. If there were a good, standard way to give everyone the same fonts, we could just use that. But there isn't, not really.
You are right that there isn't any way to make an html page show up in the same font on everyones display. This is not a problem with html - it is an implication of being cross-platform! HTML frees the author from worrying about tedious layout questions so s/he can focus on content, while the layout is handled on the browser end. There is no other way to handle this without discarding the entire notion of cross platform portability. A font which looks good on one machine with one browser and one configuration file may be unreadable on the same browser on the same machine with a different config! Let alone the same browser on a different machine, or a different browser on a different machine. Remember - some browsers run in environments that don't even have fonts.
The whole point to HTML is to free the web designer from having to worry about this stuff. Don't use font tags - label your content properly and let the browser decide on the fonts. The browser is in a position to know what display properties your viewer has - the web designer is not.
Now that said, there are a lot of people out there that still want to do silly things like using gifs of text - and the standard is flexible enough to allow that, and host of other things, script languages, frames, fonts and colours etc - that are not always portable across platforms. Writing good HTML does NOT mean writing for the lowest common denominator as sometimes is asserted by those who don't want to bother writing good html - it is perfectly possible to write a fancy-schmancy page that is customised for a particular browser on a particular OS with a particular resolution that will still work on any other platform too - this is the genius of the HTML spec. The key is the concept of graceful degradation. When you use frames - use the noframes tag (and don't leave it empty.) When you use graphics - use the alt attribute. These things aren't that difficult - and take far less time than is typically spent tuning pages for even a single display.
Lynx also shows the names of the images in the links, and these images are all named consistently. The ALT text would be exactly the same, except without the ".gif". w3m goes one better, and just shows the names, and that they are images.
Ok, there are two browsers that are going out of their way to compensate for the poor design of the site. BTW, I just checked it out in lynx myself, and while it is sort of usable in lynx, this is because lynx is going far beyond the call of duty in trying to handle these situations by displaying the filename in absence of an alt tag - you cannot assume any other browser is going to do this. A good web designer does not assume that the viewer is using a browser that s/he is familiar with!
Load that page up Opera with autoload=no show=yes (mode 2) and all you get is two frames, the left one is nothing but white space, the right is white space down to the bottom of the page, then two links, both with the same text, "Learning Photoshop 5.5 and ImageReady 2.0 for the web." I haven't bothered to reboot to check this in Netscape, but Opera in mode 2 generally renders almost identically to Netscape with images turned off. Put Opera in mode 1 (load=no and show=no - text only mode) and you now get a bunch of undifferentiated image-boxes in both frames, most (but not all) of which are links, each box marked with the same word - IMAGE. Opera *will* render the page just fine - if you put it in mode 3 and enable frames, but the fact that the page fails to render meaningfully in 2 out of 3 modes (and in any mode without turning frames on) is damning. By comparison Slashdot (hardly a paragon of good HTML) renders in a usable fashion in any configuration.
Your guess is as good as mine precisely what that page would sound like through a voice browser - but I do know that if the alt attributes were set and the noframes tag was used properly a voice browser would be able to handle it properly, and that as it is a voice browser is simply not going to be able to handle it in any meaningful way.
However, you're right, someone doesn't know how to write HTML, was in a hurry, or hacked a pre-existing page. You should never have a closing body without a starting body tag, and frames don't need a starting body tag, so...
Yes, and while this sort of thing is unfortunately rampant on the web lately, the fact that she sets herself up as a teacher of web designs makes it particularly shameful.
But even with all that, these pages look fine in most any browser, AFAICT. Isn't that the point?
I hope I have made it clear that this page will not in fact renderly properly in any browser, and that is my point.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Actually it looks ok on Opera - IF you mess with the window size and/or zoom function for awhile. I totally agree with you though, the design is awful, and her advice is awful. I'm really ashamed to be a slashdotter today... ugh, she's being held up as an expert, a teacher, a role model... this is sick.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
That's fine. I have nothing against artful designs, or even WYSIWYG editors for that matter (they are great time savers.) But neither of those is an excuse for bad HTML, and that's what I found all over her site. There is no excuse for an empty noframes tag. There is no excuse for a page of links, all tied to graphics which are simply obfuscated text, with no alt attributes. Particularly when this page belongs to someone who presents herself as an expert on web page design.
I am no expert on web design, but I was able to find three serious errors on one of her pages without even trying. Design errors, that flaunt ideals she presented herself as an advocate of in the interview. I am NOT talking about running her pages through a validator and bitching about picky pedantic errors - I am talking usability and accessibility problems. Ones that could have been fixed in a few minutes if she cared.
Sure, it was probably her wysiwyg editor, but that is no excuse. There isn't any wysiwyg editor on the market that produces ready to publish html - and likely never will be. You use them to rough out your page - then you tidy it up before you publish. Any web design student should know that, let alone a teacher!
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Imagine trying to navigate Slashdot without any images...
I do. It's nice. Want to see slashdot the way I do? Turn off image loading on your browser (if you have Opera use mode 2, this is what I am actually using, but Netscape with image loading disabled will be very similar) and load up http://slashdot.org/?light
Not only does it load a lot faster like this, it's also a hell of a lot easier to read and navigate.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I F YOU PAID $1,000,000 to advertise on the Super Bowl and only viewers with a Sony 35 inch TV set could see it, would you be getting your money's worth?
Accessible web design increases the size of the audience for your page. Inaccessible designs lock part of your audience out. How is that justifed by "da bottom line?"
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
it isn't redundant unless it's been said
...
A warning like that needs to be at the top
It has already been said, and a warning is at the top. It's called the article in question.
From what I've read thus far, I like Lynda because she seems to understand the realities of the situation while still hoping for a real solution.
As other people have pointed out in the thread, Lynda does not practice what she preaches. Liking her just because she's smart enough to make a populist remark in an interview seems a little too naive, especially given her previous track record (as you point out).
As for the whole world living off of 2400 baud no graphics terminals, no. The reason the internet has gotten the hype and growth(for better or for worse, that's a whole different discussion) is because of things like the web and its mixture of graphics and text. And like it or not, that's how things are now, and they won't just go back to the past. You personally may like just pages and pages of plain text, but the average person definately does not. I'm not a big fan of flashing animations, or whole page image maps any more than you are.
Although it's a cliche, a picture can be worth a thousand words. We live in a very visually based society. Most people access their comptuer through a gui interface. Why? Because it's easier, and it's nice, and they like it, why shouldn't the web be the same way?
And I'll say it again, it's all about the happy medium.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
And yes, I did visit his web page, and the quotes he has chosen show a sharp mind, on par with New Yorker cartoons.
Now, I understand that some people consider pokemon and a Big Mac to be high art. And I'm not going to diss you for not liking his site.
I do suggest, however, that the point of his site is content.
Perhaps, with time, you will grow to appreciate what he has to say, and why he has said it.
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
cheers,
She says it herself, "I have never created a Web site other than our own."
cheers,
I wonder why Lynda Weinman think's this is a tall order. Perhaps the following might give her difficulties some context:
Although she admits that Flash has "challenges" in areas of "accessibility and interaction with other Web technologies" she seems to give no advice about utilising the real benefits of the WWW.
She might sing a nice song about Open Source and a cross-platform WWW, but until she demonstrates some understanding of the concepts, newbies beware.
Quite what her courses have to do with her excitement with XML and "devices other than Web browsers delivering Web content" I have no idea.
CalumAnd exactly how many times did this wonderful advocate of Open Standards mention CSS?
If Flash is the answer, then presumably the question is not "How do share structured information with someone on another computer, another browser, or another network?". That's a shame.
One day people will understand what the WWW idea ("portable content") was all about. Of course it might be past salvage by then.
The only problem is that this stuff is pretty new and no one's written editing software to take advantage of it yet. Stay tuned to the w3.org site and I highly recommend reading Tim Berners-Lee's Weaving The Web.
i remember being on a pr0n site on geocities where the perosn had thoughtfully put thumbnails of all the picture on one page with a click for larger version. Unfortunately they had simply used the full size image with width=100 height=100 in the tag. Very painful
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
> Just off the first two pages I've already seen two really poor commands ... ...
using tables to control text flow
There does seem to be a very good usibility reason
for shortening the width of of text columns so that they scan easier. Tables/CSS seem the only
posible ways of doing this. Problem is neither
really offers a way to do it right: I want my
column to be 40 em wide not 50% browser width
or 150 pixels.
Rich
My thoughts exactly. Propably because she's a woman, and slashdot readers are (in general) interested in female geeks for some strange reason.
Once again. You people make me sick.
Pah.
Quote from FAQ of the superb TV Go Home:
'Why use a JPEG for the listings instead of text?
'Because I want precise control over the layout. And because it seriously annoys "real ale" Internet users who do all their browsing on text-based hand-held calculators, and that arouses me.'
I've never even heard of Lynda Wienman, or her books, or even her website and I've been making webpages since '95 Just paid a visit to the site - what's the big deal?
Maybe you just don't get out much? [grin]
Lynda's contribution to web design rests mostly on her championing of the browser-safe palette and image optimisation -- basically a "less is more" philosophy that was very refreshing and influential at a time of massive web site bloat.
Her books emphasise design practice over theory or geek code fixation.
She is far from perfect as an HTML practitioner and herself does not believe the appellation "guru" is appropriate.
But she deserves the attention she has earned.
-----
A rich couple found their ideal pet in a dog that makes e-mail programs.
One of my first experiences with web building was working with the color safe pallette, trying to understand what colors composed it, and how they looked side by side. Sure, I could probably have programmed a little utility to make all the nice swatches myself, but Lynda had these images on her page:
Color Safe Pallette - By hue
Color Safe Pallette - By Value
It was one of the most helpful tools I have ever had for the net. Now I can easily find a color, it's hex value, and how it contrasts with black or white. -Misch
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Check out this poll from her site - the question is "What size browser window do you develop for?" and then to top it off "any/all" isn't even listed as a choice!
I agree. This poll question is a bit ambiguous. I interpreted it as "What's the minimum browser size your sites are optimized for?" Of course, it could also be taken as "What's the maximum size..." In which case, Lynda.com's answer would not be 1280x1024. Set your resoultion to this and click here. Notice the tile effect that results from not making the background image wide enough. Maybe it's my anal-retentiveness, but it annoys the hell out of me.
Sure. Getting "just the news" from Attrition is fine if that's your bag, but you're comparing apples to oranges. CNN is by no means a "just the news" type of web site.
The real question is
Don't throw in a bunch of buzz-words to make a point.
Fortunately, cascading style sheets (CSS), which allows one to associate positioning information with every HTML tag while preserving an elegant HTML source code, promises to satisfy both the HTML purists and the web designers. Unfortunately, CSS is still very inconsistently implemented by browsers. Still there is hope. If only the browsers will implement CSS properly as specified by the W3 consortium, and not try to extend it again.
P.S. Slashdot should not have posted this article at all. Wrong audience. Webreference was the correct forum.
Her site reads like a "Being an idiot web flunky for dummies" book.
The webpage looked just dandy, full window, 1600*1200. This has to be the worst case of the blind (trying to) lead the blind, I have seen in a long time.
#include clue.h
Yeah, that's fair enough. I can't say I was that impressed with the site either - after reading the book, I expected, well, something better. But then I don't think she sets herself up as a HTML programmer, but as someone who teaches graphic designers who are unused to the medium how to work well with it. In that capacity, she's very talented, and I don't think it's quite fair to dismiss her so quickly because her site is poorly composed.
Skim through one of her books sometime - the one I refered to earlier is very well-written and helpful. I wish I had known about it when I was trying to figure out some of these things myself!
When I first started my job as an assistant web designer, one of the first things my boss did was to give me a copy of Ms. Weinman's _Designing Web Graphics 3_, which was the book she used as a textbook when she taught web design at Georgetown University. The main thrust of the book is -not- teaching HTML...Ms. Weinman basically says, it's good to know how this stuff works, but it's less stressful to find yourself a good WYSIWYG editor. She works instead to help people learn to design useable, attractive web pages - and hey, couldn't we use more of those? She mainly works through her books, by the way. Her site is mainly used for examples and information about her products.
The site you link to is a very good site, sure. But there's no art to it, and that's what Ms. Weinman tries to help people learn - not HTML.
such sad little people, we should all read the comments of OOG each and every day. it would serve to enlighten us all.
WWOD
Where hast Great OOG gone?
we should head his words, and force companies to acknowledge the "true" way. DOWN WITH BLOATED WEB PAGES!!!
Where hast Great OOG gone?
I believe there are sites and sites.
I suppose that most of the people reading slashdot are tech people, that when tey go to a web site, is ussually for gathering information. Meaning they are interested on the site for the text. The knoledge they can get.
But there are many other people on this planet.
Many companyes must have "nice" images and web designs, in orther to create a "corporative image". those sites are interested in "selling", and therefore may atract more customers by having nice images (oviosly, I am one of the customers that will read every single line of tech especifications).
One down side, I do not think there are any system for diseabled people , that can read pages with many frames, tables, java, or flash animations.
Ok, I am done, ready to be flammed.
If we always do what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always got...
How to prevent it? Easy. Force every web designer to view their work... with a 56k dialup.
t tp://www.toomanygraphics.com
What's needed is a simslowconnection.com, which simulates a slower connection for a given web page. Thus you could send e-mail to a bandwidth-hog webmaster, saying "look at your site through
http://www.simslowconnection.com/test.pl?page=h
and see if you still like using your page.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Specifically, what is Lynda doing that deliberately breaks cross-platform compatibility? Her pages looked readable in w3m under Linux, and that's good enough for me.
Open standards and cross-platform compatibility *can* exist, but not enough people use it! There's a big difference between writing a spec and making people conform to it. Until the HTML spec is *better* than what Evil-Browser-X wants you to do, people aren't going to use it, and Conformant-Browser-Y will be broken.
Therefore, a project like Mozilla is a step in the right direction: a great, spec-conformant browser with a fast engine that people can use for their own projects might cause people to write HTML with it in mind. (web browsers are like platforms for HTML) If so, the HTML would naturally be more spec-conformant because the browser is.
In an ideal world, the W3C would put out the best browser, and the spec would be friendlier than anything a corporation can come up with. Do you now understand that we live in a far less than ideal world, the spec is a nasty compromise with big corporate interests looming over it, and Amaya is an ugly-looking, unpopular browser?
Are you now wishing for people to use those darn open standards, and write pages with cross-platform compatibility in mind?
I know I am. I'd rather use HTML and JPEGs than let PowerPoint mangle perfectly good images, but people like me are in the minority, and the majority has taken over the web.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Keep up the good work, Lynda! I completely agree with using tables to organize text properly.
Oh, and the 216-color "web-safe" palette is obsolete: it has always looked nasty, all by itself!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, you have the wrong link, for starters.
Try this one (Lynda with a 'Y').
And yeah, it still doesn't validate, but the W3C Validator is strict, and pretty crappy too. And the CSS validates just fine. Pretty good, for a (probably hacked) "Adobe GoLive 4" generated page.
And remember: Valid HTML might be syntactically correct, but that doesn't make it Good.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What do you think about people who say that the web is for the most part a huge waste of bandwidth? There's a lot of people out there who really just want to revert to the primordial ooze of plain ASCII text gotten from archie/FTP or elsewhere, but the web is here to stay, complete with 300KB images that contain nothing but a picture of text that the web designer thought was in a cool (but browser-wise unavailable) font.
:)
What's the most hideous use of bandwith-busting graphics that you've seen, and how do we avoid the brainless design decisions that lead us down such evil paths?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
She writes good books for beginners... and she does it right!
Instead of saying, "this is an tag..." like SO many books do, she teaches web design from the perspective of creating quality websites. There are entirely too many "web design" books out there on the market that just shove some HTML on the reader and hint on design.
Her books cover some great intro topics that allow readers to understand what makes a high quality website. Elements such as file format selection (GIF, JPG, PNG), and the use of tables for layout, and much more.
I'd recommend her books as a great place to start for anybody interested in quality "web design".
It's an odd quirk of fate that made this woman famous. When Netscape put out the first version of Navigator, they chose to handle displaying multiple images with different color palettes on 8-bit color systems by dithering everything to a 6X6X6 color cube. This information was freely available in the support section of their site, although it wasn't obvious to look for it there. Check out the date on this technote:
4 .html
http://help.netscape.com/kb/consumer/19960513-1
Big-time designers fresh out of classes in multimedia made 32-bit images on their enormous Macintosh monitors and then wondered why they looked so bad on the web.
In the multimedia company where I worked, I was the techie who learned about the web, figured out what worked by reading usenet and Netscape's technotes, and then taught the designers about it.
After I'd been doing this for a year or so, Lynda's first book came out. It wasn't great, and contained a few technical mistakes about image formats and when to use which one (I don't think she knew much about how JPEG compression worked), but it gave some simple advice about color palettes that Photoshop jockeys could understand, so I happily let the designers learn the ropes from her book instead of me. A few months later, everyone had a copy of her book.
These days, they all know this stuff cold. Of course, most people have better than 8-bit color now too.
Sad to hear that she's promoting something as evil as Flash now. Maybe she should do a nostalgia tour with Laura Lemay, destroyer of trees.
Lynda's books are written from the perspective of someone who knows how to create images but isn't a webhead.
I'm sure there are millions of webheads out there who are comfortable with the web and computers but have no idea how to even draw a straight line without help.
I'm one of those people. I'd love a book that would tell me how to use Photoshop or Fractal Design Painter from the perspective (pun intended) of someone who needs to understand perspective and other drawing concepts as well. I feel I could have some great designs in me if I just understood how the whole art world works.
So basically, I want a beginning art book that focuses on using drawing/image editing software to create great images, but that takes the time to explain image creation concepts in detail.
Anyone know of such a book?
D
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Wow, I remember the web looking akin to Yahoo!, very few if any graphics and just really basic HTML script. There wasn't a great deal of styling but that was alright because people for the most part designed pages well. Now pages take several minutes to load on a 28.8 modem. I designed my site for small pipe connections. Before the SSI all the pages or only about 6KB with a 27KB title picture (yeah it'd be smaller if it were a GIF). The actual size of the page depends entirely on how lazy I've been that day/week/month. It's tough now to make pages that can be viewed well in every different browser and OS. All of the HTML except for the very small amount of scripting is all standards compliant. I don't bother with making it fully compliant with every browser because the lack of the scripted effect won't change the look or layout of my page.
Web design right now is going through the same birth pangs that desktop publishing went through when we were first able to change the font and layout of a page. Some people go ape shit with fonts, colours, and images until their page is unreadable. Others go for an austere look that doesn't convey a sense of creativeness. Then of course is the medium range that isn't either of the extremes. What I would like to see something like PostScript for the web. HTML is being extended past the point of its usefulness as a publishing form. Remember HTML was originally designed for indexing large numbers of files in an archive, not driving sites like MSNBC. Whenever I do any sort of publishing I export it to a PDF (gotta love PDF) so none of my formatting or design is lost. This is mostly for my benefit, I'll take docs down to Kinkos to borrow their laser printers and I don't want to mess with the incompatibilities of word processors. Wanting a PS-ish language for the web is asking a bit much, afterall HTML is incredibly easy to render (hence it's initial popularity) but I think something new IS needed.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Also note that Greenspun walks the walk. A nice, simple layout, wrapped around some nifty photos presented in an easily digestable thumb-nail format. My only complaint is that he uses white backgrounds as a default. (I will never understand why people do this... It's a computer, it doesn't *have* to look like paper, and having a CRT shining it's high beams in your face does not make for a pleasant reading experience).
I too checked out her web site. And was amazed about how non-consistent a web-page may be. Not one page looked like the other. I do not say pages has to be exactly the same - that would be boring. But they need to share some common design ideas so that they may be cognished as a whole.
Secondly, she seems to have forgotten about compatibility - her site is not even (as you mention) optimized for a specific window size, btu for a specific OS. She has not shoosen any "fallback"-fonts, thus the default is used, which with her font-sizer setting gives totally unreadable text under most UNIXes (And probably Mac too, and Mac users who are so daring about look!)...
As to your comment about tables: Tables are much much better to format the text and create coloured blocks, than the zillions of pictures used on many web sites, so there she's finally right...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Slashdot is not about all the little boxes. Matter of fact, CNN is the only little box I use on a regular basis.... and it could be replaced by a link at the bottom of the page.
Slashdot is, as a matter of fact, about content... and, as the previous poster said, about moderation... not in graphics use, but in the readership weeding out the AC's from the juicy tidbits. If all I had was a steenking dummy terminal and 2400 baud, I would still read Slashdot, although all those little boxes would surely go bye-bye.... Thanks to Taco's excellent customizations, mostly with one flick of the spacebar. (q.v. "lite mode") (I would probably also run the threshold up another notch, and decline to moderate.... weeding thru 100kb of AC flamage isn't nearly as much fun when your download speed is within an order of magnitude of your reading speed as when you've got a significaant fraction of a megabit for a pipe....)
No, the problem is that the Microsofties and the Netscape/AOLs of the world (a plague on both their houses for this) have convinced all the newbies that a world devoid of flashy grahpics and megabitpipes is one not worth living in. Politely put, bullshit. One can live just fine at 2400 baud, no graphics, dummy terminal. I did for many years. It's simply a matter of picking sites with minimal fluff and maximal real content.... like Usenet used to be ten years ago. Matter of fact, some places on Usenet are still very useful. Even better, what about mailing lists? Those don't generally have graphics (although I can't say that for a number of better-known MUA's :), and still manage to be extremely useful.
Slashdot unusable without tables and little boxes. Puh-leeeze. Admittedly there is a good portion of the web that does, in fact, stink when you have your images turned off. Even my own ISP has a major problem with overgraphicsitis on some pages, and those guys are otherwise cool as a dewar full of liquid nitrogen. But we went thirty years without requiring a graphics-able terminal in order to do useful things in cyberspace, and we're not bloody about to start now.
--
I remember when we had 300 baud and liked it.
1) no font tags. It slows download times, bloats filesize, and holds no weight for the colourblind. If you want to make colour or font size changes, be uniform -- use css to make certain pages are readable with/without your changes. My page is an example of css not going overboard.
2) no frames, unless you handle them right! Set targets! If someone hits back, It better not take them to the top of your site!
3) Indent paragraphs the way they should be -- with a <P>! Use a "text-indent: 20px" to get the appropriate result. Non css (that is, 2.0 and lower) browsers won't recognize this, but the result is not important at that level. It will still have a clear break. I have personally converted a <br> Text to a <p>text <</p> pair and saved 10 k off of a 55k document! Each tag went from 25 bytes to 7!
4) Break up tables. Nothing is worse than going to a page like stileproject and waiting for a half hour for it to load. break things down as much as possible. Not everybody is on the campus net, or on dsl.
5) keep all pages, unless they are about graphics or media, under 25k. most of my pages weigh a measly 2.6k. That is because I don't use images. I designed a portal template that takes at most 4k. Adding stuff later won't be much a burden on the webserver or the user that way.
6) finally, use xhtml where available. This way, you have validated code, and little handheld web devices can grab your data in the future.
Lowmag.net
I've read Lynda's books and they're really good for beginner - intermediate designers, but kinda' are redundant once you know what you're doing. That being said, she's a kick ass person and a Mac person as well. (iirc, she worked electronic pre-press long before.)
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Without the standards nazis, the RMSs, the detail sticklers, and all the other inflexible bastards in this world, there would be no room for your mostly-compliant pages that work only because browser makers have coded their rendering engines forgivingly enough that you can get away with it.
Without standards, there is no Internet. Without the W3C, there is a power void filled by any self-serving corporation in whose interest it is to see the "standards" bent their own way. Without a detailed specification of the way a markup language should and should not behave, you have no common ground off of which to build.
Interestingly enough, the reason you have to design for what looks best, works best for the majority of browsers, and gets the job done, with compromises in each of those areas, is because the standards were not implemented as spec'ed, forcing you into work-arounds to the Nth degree. As content as you may be with this bizarre stretch of HTML, it is by no means a utopia, nor is it the fault of the W3C.
Standards are your friend. Learn it, repeat it, live it. Not that your post was anything but a crude attempt to start a flamewar, but it was too stupid to pass up.
It's all about moderation. And compatibility, which is really the hard part, even though it's not really the fault of the web designers...once again, just look at microsoft
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I've never even heard of Lynda Wienman, or her books, or even her website and I've been making webpages since '95 Just paid a visit to the site - what's the big deal ?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
The real question is ... how much more impressive is an article about potatoes with images tables javascripts php perl cgi and whatever ... compared to the simple bare-minimum html page with nothing other than black text on a white background. The article doesn't change ... The potato still grows ... so what's the need for extra space? People like eye candy ... just look at microsoft.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Anyone interested in designing usable cross-platform web pages should check out Dr. Jakob Nielsen's website UseIt. Wonderful content, textbook-perfect cross-platform html, but [IMHO] ugly as sin.
Another excellent site with more of a hands-on, tutorial approach is All Things Web. Very good content & asthetically pleasing to boot.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I had said that content is 95% text, and style is 95% graphics, and the WWW is optimised for content (text).
Some people would say that fonts and text layout are therefore graphics fit into my idea of content. Those people are wrong. Fonts are collections of characters, which are graphics in themselves. And text layout is the physical positioning, spacing, etc of text characters. Text, however, is independant of its font and layout. You can take 10 point Arial in a justified paragraph and change it to 12 point Courier in a single line, but the text still has the same meaning. Text, meaning the ideas that the font characters represent, is independant of its presentation. My personal design philosophy is that content should always be independant of style, and never depend on it. If a user is unable to absorb the information from your website after he has turned off JavaScript, CSS, images, Java, and all plug-ins (ie Flash), then your site is a failure. (The same caveat regarding image archives applies.)
The best test is to try viewing your site with a text-only browser, like Lynx. If you aren't able to communicate ideas effectively to Lynx, then you have either too much style, not enough content, or both.
The old saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words" is true, if the graphics are properly appplied. Look at Slashdot. The site is mainly text, yet those icons for the story topics on the index page are very helpful; they allow me to grep the contents as fast as possible. But the graphics on Slashdot are acceptable because: if you remove them, the site loses no functionality. (In fact, I believe that there is even an option in the "User Preference" section to turn off those graphics.) Don't become dependant on graphics. To put it in a different light, graphics on the web should be frivolous, they should never be a necessity.
(Yes, the caveat regarding image archives and sites whose purpose is to present images applies!)
I looked at the link in the story description, about Lynda. She appears to be my idealogical opposite on WWW design theory. (She looks like a high-school art teacher; need I say more?) I read the bit about Flash (ugh) and Real... I don't think I'll be coming back to see her answers to this interview.
Heil JonKatz!
Signed,
Anti-JonKatz Troll
Heil JonKatz!
Signed,
Anti-JonKatz Troll
Fighting Nazis on Slashdot since 1999
I agree with you wholeheartedly with your opinions regarding stylesheets. I do however take task with your comments on frames =)
Another thing that really bugs me is the now-popular trend to make web pages look like printed pages; for example, with columns down the left and right of EVERY page of a web site with the standard menu of links. (Slashdot does this.) These should be in frames, so the body is a page in the middle frame with nothing but the body text in that HTML file. Again, accessibility is sacrificed for appearance, and in a portable, small-screen text-based device, it will be unreadable. A text-to-speech reader will not work on the page without reading the entire left menu column on every page.
It turns out frames as they are used now would not actually be that good for a small windowed browser - here's why. With a framed site on a small screen, either
1) The person designing the site will have assigned a percentage to the navigation part, and a percentage to the content part - in which case, if they use graphics in the navigation part at all, they are liable to have scrollbars inserted there (because if they didn't the whole thing couldn't be viewed) thus rendering the site horrible (requiring to scroll to see design graphics) or
2) The person designing the site will have assigned a fixed value to the navigation part, and what's left over (or some arbitrary value) to the content part - in which case one part of your screen renders OK, and what little there is left of the rest you have to navigate painfully due to the size of your screen.
In addition frames are a bad idea due to the inability to say to someone 'hey, check out this URL' when referring to a framed site. If I want to email you a URL of a site that uses frames, I can't. I can either email you the URL of the original frameset, and say 'navigate to page X', or I can email you the URL of X, whereupon you will miss the navigational aids.
However, most of your post I'll agree with. Accessibility is good, and it seems there's a lot of work that disregards it. I guess it's easier not to know how to do something and get on with it anyway.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
- The layout is resolution-dependent, and the sizes are hard-coded. It will not reflow to adjust to higher resolutions.
- The colors really hurt my eyes.
- Images are used instead of text, without ALT attributes. The same goes for images that link to stuff.
- The page looks like crap in anything besides the two major browsers. Just try it in Netscape 3.x or Opera.
Isn't this exactly what most web design guides advise against? Granted, the other pages look different, but the main page still breaks every design rule I can think of.And does the logo remind anyone else of an SUV-driving earth-loving vegetarian snob? :)
--
I think one of the most valuable skills as a web designer is actual design training / skills. Even though someone with design sense may not know exactly how to get what they want using HTML, many geeks who know HTML inside and out can't come up with elegant designs for their sites.
When I look at a website, I want fast, simple, clean, and content driven. I want to read what I want. I want to find it easily. I want it now.
What I don't want (and what I see more often than I'd like) is ugly, hard to read, , etc. Not to mention that I often have trouble finding what I want on a site. Good HTML skills are useless if you don't design the site well to begin.
Design sense is easily the most important ingredient in a good website after content.
-- Jeremiah
One thing that is often forgotten about HTML is that it is intended to define the structure of a document, not its presentation. That is why elements and attributes controlling appearance (color, alignment, etc.) have been deprecated in the HTML 4 standard. All aspects of a page's presentation should be in style sheets. This maximizes accessibility. (See http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/intro.html#h-2.3) With this design system, if I don't like the wasted space of a 3-inch column of text going down my 12-inch wide monitor, I can disable the style sheets and view the text from one side of the screen to the other.
Another thing that really bugs me is the now-popular trend to make web pages look like printed pages; for example, with columns down the left and right of EVERY page of a web site with the standard menu of links. (Slashdot does this.) These should be in frames, so the body is a page in the middle frame with nothing but the body text in that HTML file. Again, accessibility is sacrificed for appearance, and in a portable, small-screen text-based device, it will be unreadable. A text-to-speech reader will not work on the page without reading the entire left menu column on every page.
I would never trust web design advice from www.lynda.com with their design philosophy. They don't understand the purpose of HTML, and make the types of mistakes I pointed out. (Of course, they wouldn't regard them as mistakes, they do it intentionally.) Also, look in the source of the front page; there's a script with a comment reading
THIS IS A WONDERFUL LITTLE SCRIPT
IT WILL BREAK ANY PAGE OUT OF FRAMES
All that does on the front page is reduce accessibility ON PURPOSE. What the hell is the point of that??
If a web page is supposed to have an exact appearance that will work only on desktop computers with large graphical displays, HTML is not the proper tool. You might as well make a big GIF imagemap with all the text and hyperlinks with only the minimal HTML needed to operate the imagemap.
I wish more web sites would use HTML properly. The increase in accessibility would make possible such browser features as automatic table of contents generators (from the H1..H6 tags), collapsible outlines (from the OL, UL, and LI tags), and resizable tables. But they would choke on most major sites today because they abuse HTML. Perhaps the only way that web designers will change is when HTML software actually starts to take full advantage of the HTML elements.
JavaScript is actually a fairly nice scripting language. Not half as nice or powerful as Perl, but a tasteful, minimalist application of client-side JScript with server-side (if you use Netscape Enterprise) JScript can do some really elegant things. I really feel bad that JScript jas been delegated to doing mouseover image crap.
Java, while nice for flashy applications on the client-side, and for general data-moving on the server-side (i.e. servlets) is nice, but the client-side aspects are still too slow and large for general use.
And Flash... well, it's like Microsoft: good for games. ;-) But graphics are all it's good for. Even it it had the proper interfaces for use with large amounts of text, it's too slow.
And you can argue with me if you like, but content is 95% text. Conversely, style is 95% graphics. The WWW was designed, and is optimized for, displaying content which is mostly text. Hyperlink theory (Yes, "hyperlink" wasn't always a buzzword. Hypertext is based on complex theories of database design and information evolution.) makes this obvious. Despite the efforts of many graphic designers to change this, text is still what most people go on the web to see. Pictures are nice, but are mostly frivolous, except in image archives.
Perl, on the other hand, works behind the scenes. It compiles and stores information, parses HTML, and does the actual "legwork" that the fancy JavaScript/DHTML interface on your favorite e-commerce site makes so pretty. Perl is naturally suited for this, because of its intergration with the Unix environment, its RegExp capabilities, its interfaces to filesystems and networks, et cetera.
Yes, I am a Perl zealot. Behold the Camel in all his glory. But I am also someone who is very conscious of UI design and theory, and of what the WWW is and isn't currently capable of being. That's why I look down on the Flash people and the 'client-side JScript is kewl' people.
Speaking of annoying JScript, I was at a site two days ago that had used JScript to disable the right mouse-button function! If you right-clicked on a link, you got an error popping up in an alert box. I had to turn off JScript to open a link in a new browser window. Now that, folks, is disgusting.
Thanks for reading. Heil Larry Wall, and as always,
Heil JonKatz!
Signed,
Anti-JonKatz Troll
Heil JonKatz!
Signed,
Anti-JonKatz Troll
Fighting Nazis on Slashdot since 1999
It looks like people think Slashdot is interviewing her, which is not the case here. ANOTHER web page besides Slashdot has interviewed her, and a link to this interview is provided. We do not get to ask questions and the highest moderated get sent, so people/moderators please do not spend too much time coming up with good questions and moderating them
I just checked out her webpage and the interview. What I found is a bunch of just bloody awful advice for web designers. For slashdot to give this woman credence as an "expert" is truly shameful.
Just off the first two pages I've already seen two really poor commands (suggestions would be a nicer word, but less accurate it seems) to her clueless followers - using tables to control text flow and designing pages for particular screen sizes, both of which are things that anyone that understands html would know better than to do. Check out this poll from her site - the question is "What size browser window do you develop for?" and then to top it off "any/all" isn't even listed as a choice!
Go here if you are looking for good html resources - not to Lynda's site.=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
OOG LIKE VIEWING WEBSITES, BUT GROWING ESPECIALLY DISGRUNTLED WITH LARGE CORPORATE SITES AND LIKE!!! OOG UNDERSTAND ATTEMPTS TO BE GRAPHICALLY PLEASING, BUT GETTING ANNOYED OF BEING FORCED TO WATCH OBNOXIOUS FLASH ANIMATIONS (E.G. FOX.COM), DEAL WITH PERL/CGI SCRIPTS AND JAVA/JAVASCRIPT POPUPS, AND HAVE VIEWING SPACE REDUCED BY FRAMES!!! OOG WONDER IF CORPORATE WEBSITES EVER ACTUALLY GO BEYOND SERVING AS BLOATED ADVERTISIMENTS AND SERVE AS INFORMATION SITES LIKE THEY INTENDED!!! SEEMS LIKE MOST CORPORATE PAGES ONLY EMPHASIZE FLASHINESS WITHOUT ANY CONTENT QUALITY!!! OOG WANT KNOW IF THIS TREND CONTINUE, AND WHEN BIG COMPANIES FINALLY, IF EVER, REALIZE THAT FUNCTIONALITY MORE IMPORTANT THAN GIMMICKY LAYOUT AND TECHNIQUES???
OOG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!!! OOG BREAK HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CD!!!