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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.
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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Sorry, but this really pisses me off. I've had to mug around with my CSS to circumvent the buggy IE implementation (/span/ tags...), although I'm running a site aimed at Linux users. Because I care about users who use other OSes (even if it's Windos ;-)). /. is beyond my whatever (like so many things, sigh... ;-)).
Why someone like this gets an honorable mention on
Regards and thanks for your tips
tom
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
Nice page you've got there, a real asthetic sense behind it all. You don't seem to be interested in publishing as an art form. I can't think of anyone who draws or paints in Braille, it is unfortunate some people lack the sense of sight but that doesn't mean I need to cater to them all of the time, especially in publishing design. Do you bitch at magazines for printing pictures on their pages that blind people can't see? What about CDs, are you boycotting them because a deaf guy isn't going to be able to listen to them so no one else ought to? Being as blatently ignorant I doubt you can grasp the concept of HTML, it was NOT designed for publish. HTML was designed to present and organize text. Because of it's simple rendering requirements it became popular and easy to use on just about any terminal. Go blow your rant out your ass.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
I visited your web page, and I think you're just bitter because you have one of the ugliest web pages known to man. Perhaps you're taking angry potshots at people who give their pages an attractive design because you have no such aptitude?
I'm interested in replies from anybody who has visited mill's web page and thinks that his is a voice worth listening to on the subject of creating web pages.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
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.
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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
Yes, but you have to concede that font management on X (or is it Netscapes fault?) is crap. I had the similar problem with other sites. The solution was to get xfstt (a free truetype font sserver for X), setup and create a link to my windows fonts directory (yes, I dual-boot... Falcon 4.0).
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
readibility (and quick/easy access) IS the number one reason for the web right? If I wanted arty shit I'd go buy a book on design....
Yes, readability and easy access is king, but I was referring to the wonderful standards-compliant code of the page. It even degrades gracefully with alternative browsers (VERY readable in Lynx). This guy knows HTML 4.0, period.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Oh I got it now... Had a look at the source, the font sizes are defined in pixels! hehe.
;)
OT: Nice site. Coincidentaly, I was just downloading Mandrake right now, and I'll come back to molest you with my install problems in about 3 hours
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
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"?
Yep, he is. As others have observed, he knows his HTML - it's pretty close to perfect. He has some interesting quotes, too. I'm not fond of the shade of yellow he uses, but it's better than the vast majority of Angry Fruit Salad pages out there.
How about putting up an example of your own HTML, before you go attacking other people.
"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!!!