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.

Comments

Re:HTML defines structure, not appearance

[thenerd]

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.

Eh? The design diva?

[pen]

Is this the same person who owns Lynda.com? Has anyone visited the site? Allow me to summarize it for you:

• 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? :)

--

Design Sense

[Witt]

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.

HTML defines structure, not appearance

[jeff_tyrrill]

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.

perl is not the problem. you're an idiot.

[Heil JonKatz!]

I'd like to clarify something before I read another idiotic post complaining about "Perl and CGI" being related to the problem of flashy websites. PERL HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. All of that annoyance is mostly Flash, JavaScript, and Java. Perl, in contrast, is server-side, so you NEVER SEE IT, and also, it handles mostly text and database stuff -- in other words, the exact opposite of what you're talking about.

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

This is NOT a Slashdot interview

[Elyas]

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

Re:I like this woman already...

[Arker]

*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.*

OK let's take a look at that web page then. Try browsing it in Lynx. Now try it in Netscape with image loading off. It doesn't take an "expert" to set up a webpage that degrades gracefully when image loading is turned off or not available. Granted there may be cases where this is not practical - but for the majority (if not all) of her site it would be quite practical.

Look at lynda.com/resources/inspiration/index.html - it is quite a good example of the site as a whole. First off it's a frames page, which is fine, but take a look at the noframes section of that page. The tags are:

<noframes><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> </body></noframes>

*cough* I think that pretty well speaks for itself.

Another major design flaw on that same page is that the left hand frame (http://lynda.com/resources/inspiration/menu2.html ) a long list of links, each anchored to a graphic. These graphics are, in fact, simply obfuscated text, see for instance http://lynda.com/resources/inspiration/images2/col or.gif which is a gif image of the word color in a sans-serif font. The rest of the menu is exactly the same, it's just a series of gif images of text used as links, and to top THAT off there isn't an alt tag on any of them. This is a textbook example of how NOT to code a page of this type - and this woman is billed as an expert and a teacher for people building webpages!

There are likely more errors on that page, but this is enough to make my point - 3 major design errors on a single page, chosen at random (or as close as I can easily come to random, I maximized that window, closed my eyes, flipped the mouse ball around for awhile and clicked.)

1) The use of the noframes tag so as to completely defeat it's purpose is totally wrong - she might as well have just not had a noframes section at all, for the same affect.

2) The use of graphics which are simply text is bizaare and pointless. It's the sort of thing I might expect to see from a "Proud Teenage Single Moms of AOL" site - certainly not from a so-called expert.

3) Even if she feels an uncontrollable urge to use graphics of text, the lack of alt tags is utterly inexcusable. Since the graphics are simply text in disguise anyway, it would take no thought whatsoever to determine the correct alt attributes for them; color, background tiles, frames, navigation, rollovers, etc.

I don't claim to be an expert, far from it, but I would be too ashamed to ever show my face again if I put such a poorly written page on the web. How much moreso someone who makes a living teaching people to write web pages should be ashamed of such a monstrosity!

Particularly when the fixes are so easy - all that would be necessary would be to eliminate the gifs in favour of text, or at the very *least* to add alt attributes (which are a REQUIRED, not optional, part of the HTML standard anyway,) in the file menu2.html, and then insert that code in the noframes section of the main file! 5 minutes work, and if it were done then her content would be available to all. In the time I've taken to write this message, she probably could have fixed those sorts of glaring errors all over her entire site.

I guess she thought it was more important to spend that time doing an interview to promote her book and talking about how much she is in favour of "open standards" and "cross platform compatibility" though.

Hopefully this makes my original point crystal clear?

This is shameful

[Arker]

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.

OOG WANT THOUGHTS ON CORPORATE SITES!!!

[OOG_THE_CAVEMAN]

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???