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.
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
*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.*
l ) 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!
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.htm
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?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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!!!