Slashdot Mirror
Web Design Luminary Jeff Zeldman
While we're waiting for Metallica and Douglas Adams to get back to us, we might as well go back to interviewing "normal" people. This week's (first) guest is Jeff Zeldman, Web designer extraordinaire. Some people in the design business say the best way to learn what the WWW will look like in six months is to keep up with Jeff's famous www.zeldman.com site. Whether or not this is true, he's certainly written one of the best Web design tutorials ever, and is also one of the prime movers behind the Web Standards Project. There is simply no one better to answer any Web design question you care to post below (hopefully confining yourself to one question per post).
Have you ever seen anything come from a browser publisher "extending" a standard (Microsoft, Netscape, other), and thought "Gee, I wish that was in the standard"? Examples?
So, in your opinion, what are the major categories of audiences and what sort of design is appropriate for each one? Why do you think your own web page has the best design for the audience you're aiming for?
I was unable to properly view your site. I received connection errors and failed to successfully download some graphics.
;)
My question is this: What design elements would you recommend revising in order to better deal with the awesome power of the Slashdot Effect, using your site as the example?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I'm using Win95 and IE 5.
It's too small for convenient reading running at 1024x768 on a 17in monitor.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Shut up, you don't know what you're talking about.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
The point is that MS *used* to be very vocal in supporting standards
making (rightly) a lot of noise about Netscape's proprietary
extensions to HTML. But now they're the biggest browser...
I'm working on a web site which may be linked from slashdot within a few months, and I fear that my site will buckle under the load, as zeldman.com did this morning.
I really have been concerned about the slashdot effect, and I'm planning to off-load my images to another site with more bandwidth. Other than that, I'm really not sure what else I can do to prepare.
I really am sorry that my post annoyed you and others. By wording my message poorly it probably missed its chance to be chosen.
Editors: in the unlikely case that you do choose my message, please remove the second paragraph or replace it with the one from this message. I've done enough damage already.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I hate it when I click on a hyperlink on somebody's web site and I find it popping up a new window. 99% of the time, it's unnecessary except to satisfy the ego of someone whose page is so important they want it to remain onscreen while I visit the linked-to site. This is pure arrogant self-indulgence and that goes for Zeldman too.
Listen, you "gods" of website design, and listen well: if I want a new window, I'll pop it up myself! I appreciate it that you know so much more about the Internet than I do, and that I'm fortunate to have found a web site that is willing to help me so much by popping up new windows... BUT NO THANKS! I know when I want a new window popped up, and I know how to work my browser well enough do so. So leave my windows alone! Your web site isn't so fscking special that it deserves to create its own new kind of segregation. SO CUT IT OUT!
--Jim
then why the fack don't you, this guy, although a don't agree with all his stuff, is a designer's point of view, "real" designers do it from a practical point of view, there's a difference
This guy is a 'designer' the same way John Carmack is a Ballet Dancer. Which is to say he isn't. Anyone who uses BRIGHT ORANGE backgrounds with tiny black text had damned well better be color blind to excuse themself. Gawd, maybe the site would be ok if not for the COMPLETELY UNREADABLE color scheme and font size....
The opening page can be forgiven since I'm on a fast connection, the progress bar hi-jacking is annoying as hell, but I could still live with it, but that color scheme is straight from HELL and needs to go back there.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
It's true that paying only for click-throughs rather than impressions puts the whole advertiser relationship on a more objective level, but the click-through rate on the web is continuing to drop. Thus as that process continues it will become more and more difficult to fund a web site through advertising. Sure, there's profit for every click, but when you only get a (relatively speaking) small number of clicks you aren't going to be able to pay for bandwidth with that. In other words, don't spend it all in the same place :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
They pay for now, because they work for now. But the click-through rate is dropping every year, so eventually you will either not be able to sell advertising, or you will make so little that it will no longer be possible to support a web site on advertising. Maybe you could support a Yahoo.com on ads, but not a small community site like /., etc.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
2. Smart but angry people who love to flame at the slightest opportunity.
This one is me.
I don't care if it is a trick, My LORD man, get that crap off of the web before you blind some innocent passerby or hopelessly corrupt millions who go to the site to get a glimpse of 'How it should be done'.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
What's your preferred step-by-step/iterative method for designing a web site?
Where would you put:
- analysis
- concept
- test
- design
- test
- implementation
- test
- release
(did I mention "test"?)
and what are the main activities in each step?
-- anagram #17 of peter boersma: some part beer
The whole fonts issue is my number 1 pet peeve with most web sites. Why can't the "web developers" use the fonts I specify at the size I specify? I swear some developers must be using 640x480 screen sizes on 21" monitors. How else can they read those ugly[1] 8pt fonts they insist on using?
[1] Ugly is relative. I may not like the fonts you use. You might think my font selection sucks.
Well I'm using both IE5 & NN4.7 on a WinNT box and The font size used on Zeldman's site is always roughly the same size or larger than slashdots. Pictured here is the comparison between Zeldman.com in IE5, NN4.7 & /. in NN4.7 (note, I have the default font size set to 'Medium' in IE5.
/. also inconvenient for you?
So, is
[place
A practical point of view would not use absolute pixel sizes that render a site unreadable on hi-res monitors.
A practical point of view would not do that annoying "look at me! look at me! I'm an intro graphic! look at me!" idiocy on the first page.
Nothing that degrades usability for anyone is being done from a practical point of view.
This web site's behavior with respect to its stated purpose is akin to employers searching for a Unix admin, then asking him for a resume in Word format.
Web designers still haven't caught on that there is no such thing as a "static" page. It may be viewed in a variety of resolutions, color depths, window size, and font combinations, and any site that assumes any of those is a static factor is going to have egg on its face every time somebody comes along who (shock, horror!) doesn't have MS Comic Sans installed.
One of the more interesting design challenges is to do a page all in shades of gray and still make it look good. I wonder if this guy could do that. I've taken a stab at it and it actually didn't look awfully bad, although I'd probably nix the small-caps hack if I did it over again. I'd probably dim the whiteness of the text a bit too -- it's a little glare-y.
-- Old Man Kensey
Hmm.. sounds like basically the same setup I have. 1024x768 on a 17" monitor. I'll agree with the other response here, the font on his site is larger than that of Slashdot. It seems fine to me.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
How can I lay out my website so it does not fall victim to the /. effect?
>I would disable it--except that in Netscape it disables css too
style sheets - the cause of more problems...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
This is only vaguely related to design, but directly related to the web, and functionality.
We all know that banners don't work anymore. The only way a business can profit from banners is to show thousands per day. Most users don't even SEE banners anymore. We avoid them the same way we dig in the couch for the remote when commercials interrupt The Simpsons.
Do you have any suggestions to make future, content-based sites profitable?
Appart from opening up the client to more security issues, imcompatability issues and instability what does client side scripting really do for the user? I mean, how often do you REALLY need a bunch of moving flashing mouseover crap that runs on only the newest browser, requires a bunch of plugins, and all to provide very little content. I fear that with such technologies as Javascript, VBScript, etc, that we're paying less attention on content, and more on flashyness. What do you feel does client side scripting contribute to the web in terms of usability and content?
Dear Mr. best ever,
Why do you render my status bar useless with javascript mouseovers? Are you trying to disguise the state-of-the-art directory structure behind your site?
Of the recent 5k contest, which design did you like the best?
Is the trend in web design going to continue down this path - bigger, better, slower - as the size and complexity of web pages outstrip the medium which distributes them, or will we begin to see a return to simple and elegant websites?
-----------------------------------------------
I read that the release of Netscape 6.0 will be so much like IE5 that some proprietary tags made specifically for Netscape 4 will NOT work.
;-)
My question, then, is how in the world are we supposed to maintain multi-browser compatibility? Or should we even try anymore? I've been trying to steer my clients far clear of 'fancy' stuff by telling them that not everyone will see it the way we do...but with everyone else doing it, that argument is beginning to slip. Everybody wants Flash, and Quicktime, and JavaScript...
I grow weary of fighting in the Browser Wars...
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
I quote from your website:
So why, tell me, WHY did you use PIXELS (px) instead of POINTS (pt), thereby overriding my painfully crafted DPI settings, rendering your all page unviewable on my Linux machine?
I worked in the UK web design market for several years.
During that time it was obvious that (graphic) design lead technology, with Macromedia for example creating flash to meet demand from, rather than inspire, web designers.
Technology was seen as a way to say 'yes' to the designer's question 'This would be really cool - can we do it?'
Do you think this is a bad thing, do you think it is as true in the US as in Europe, and do you think it will continue to be the case?
-----
I have to second this question and the question another poster asked about why you have an entry page in the first place. I couldn't get past that so I can't comment on anything else... Bolie IV
Specifically, how bad are Netscape's problems with CSS, JavaScript, iframes, and the myriad other gripes developers hold for it?
Here's a basic answer.
Loved your work on the " Batman Forever " and " Batman & Robin " movie websites. Rumor has it that Warner Bros is buying up all variations of "Batman: Year One" (Rumored to be the next movie)...
Will you and the same design team work on that one, or is it too soon to tell?
When I pull the two pages up side by side Slashdot text is almost twice the size of Zeldman's. But I'm running IE in a larger than normal font size. The text I'm tying right now is half the size of the text of the message I'm replying to above it, this text would be inconvenient. However once I post the message it goes back to the way I like it.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
You're an idiot.- -----------
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If the W3C wants compliance, it ought to write its own browser. To hell with Microsoft and Netscape. They've both had their shot and they've proven that they are more interested in market share than W3C compliance. But can we blame them? They're corporations. They're in it for the money, and everyone knows it. So why are we relying on them to build browsers that work, when it's obvious that they have no interest in doing so?
Why don't we rely on those who do care about standards? People from the W3C and WaSP can sit around bitching about browsers all day long, but even the most well-written commentary isn't going to change the way these companies do business. Publishing standards and trusting the browser builders to comply might have worked for the Consortium in the beginning (another argument entirely), but the big boys are obviously having too much fun with their pissing contest to pay attention to those of us who have to work with their shoddy products. Why are we still letting them rule the playground?
Build a browser that works, and let everyone download it for free - including Microsoft and Netscape. Why not? Let them build their proprietary browser extensions around a base module that works, and then no one will care if Netscape adds a layer tag, or if Microsoft uses its own version of javascript. These features will become extras that can be exploited by programmers instead of barricades set to trip us up.
Build it, and they will come. And if they don't, who cares? The rest of us will, and good riddance to them both.
Jeff,
Do you think that your job will change as new technology like broadband and WAP come along and are more available to consumers?
Chris. (chris@printf.net)
If you're such a hotshot web designer, why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design: Putting an "entry page" that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
When I wrote this earlier, I had forgotten that Amaya existed. What a lasting impression it made when I tried it out last summer!
Amaya may be compliant, but it sucks. Just as Microsoft and Netscape need to learn from W3C's standards, the W3C needs to learn a few things from the evil corporations... like how to build a browser people will actually use.
You could pull a better design out of your ass? Then do it. Let's see it. Post the link here. We'll vote on it. And you better scan around zeldman.com, webstandards.org, and alistapart.com to make sure you know whereof you speak. Oh, and remember: Having a successful site (original content, community, etc.) will get you bonus points.
But if, as I suspect, you're yet another trash talking punk, then please shut the hell up. Thank you.
- Rev.Sir:
Considering the somewhat lacking support for the features in the current specification of the W3C in both of the large-scale browsers (and some of the smaller ones), what do you feel is the best way to motivate them to become as compliant as possible? If it was as simple as users urging them, it would probably be done now. But Microsoft and Netscape still seek their own forms of 'embrace and extend' on their browsers. Any ideas as to how to try and get them to pay more attention to the standards?
----
Brazil has decided you're cute.
Two questions - the first a tease, the second more or less serious, both regarding the WSP:
1) WHY do most professional Web designers seem unable to comprehend HTML's alt attribute?
2) The WSP's doing a great job on browser makers (thanks), but (perhaps coz it's lead/supported by so many designers) it stays pretty quiet about designer standards - an equally serious problem crippling the Web. Any plans in this regard - or are Web users going to have to set up "The Other Web Standards Project" (...or something to that effect) themselves?
No offence, just serious disillusionment.
What's with that small font www.zeldman.com, haven't you read any (web) usability guides?
Your site was the inspiration for the site I did for my wife.
Anyway, how soon do you think it will be until we can use only style sheets on our websites without worrying about graceful degredation?
This is not to say, by the way, that we shouldn't use tables, as Slashdot and I do. What do you think about Slashdot's layout? Especially the black background with the white table in front?
Do you think that current web standards will leave out more and more people as they get "fancier"?
And, if so, do you think that there is a need for a fresh start, in which browsers intelligently determine the appearance, from a user's specification, and in which servers deliver only the raw information?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now that web designers are more and more gaining the ability to control how their pages look, users seem to have less and less.
Old school web programmers indicate this is a terrible loss. New web designers, many influenced by the firmly established print world, feel the opposite.
Do you feel that the designer, or the user, should have ultimate control?
The only reason IE 4 was better than NS 4 was because it came out later, compare Quake 3 to Quake 1 which is better? They are both trying to do the same thing, FPS, so why is the later one better? (it came out later)
On a side note you should start to forget supporting the version 3 browsers, anyone still using them needs more help then being able to browse you site. People will use the lowest common denominator as long as developers keep supporting them.
That's my $.02
Munky_v2
"Warning: You are logged into reality as root..."
Jay
There was a time when media would compete for readers to generate revenue from sales of the media but now the empasis seems to be to get readers to impress advertisers to part with money.
.oO0Oo.
When you design a web site should it be for the benefit of users or the benefit of page impression (i.e. splitting an article over three pages so the user gets three banner ads) and how do you balance that?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This guys website ranks among the top 10 ugliest sites I've ever seen. I hope to god someone kills him before anyone else adopts his complete lack of design skills.
I suppose it would be forgiveable if he were color blind and used a giant magnifying lense to browse his site.
Why are we asking this guy for advice again? I could pull a better design out of my ass.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
All of these questions are idiotic, rhetorical, or easily answerable without going to an "authority".
What I'd really love to see, is sane handling of combinations of pixel and percentage values in tables and such. Sometimes, you want to have a defined width on parts of a table, but say "just fill in the rest" on the rest of the table. For example, if I want a table that has some sort of a window that scales with the browser window size, you'd wana put your corners in as being statically sized, but the inside area just fill in whatever is left of the % of the screen which the table fills. Get it? :)
Jeff Zeldman doesn't need me to defend him or his recognized place among the web design greats, but allow me to say that just as absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence, neither does anyone's ignorance of Mr. Zeldman's legacy of work or stature mean that he has none.
Neither does his legacy or stature endow him with infallibility (or a need to march lockstep with conventional thinking on all matters). I do agree with a few of the quibbles raised here and would be interested in his reasons for going against the CW on px vs pt and hijacking the status bar.
I do know from his excellent mailing list (and now web site) that he tends to believe in stretching the limits on PERSONAL sites, while playing it more conservative on "for hire" customers.
Believe me, he knows of what he speaks. And if you haven't heard of him and want to know who is out of it (you or the rest of the world) try typing "Zeldman" into Google.
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
i know i'm just reiterating what has already been said but the "entry" page is passe, overdone, and against good design sense nowadays.
the javascript status bar is one of the most annoying "features" being practiced today.
the whole site, from his "pixel defined layouts" to specific style extensions are entirely blindspotted. so far it's been totally unreadable/unusable on most computers i've tried to view it at (mostly linux/solaris/hp but including several windows boxes).
his page doesn't comply with standards (it failed validation). ironic from someone who is supposed to be establishing them?!
there are broken links (his links to third party pages of people using his graphics). it's easy to automate this to verify links are still good
the navigation is inconsistent and poor. sometimes there's a side bar, sometimes some links underneath...
there's a lot of self-hype that i find no justification in. so he scanned a lot of pictures and ran them through a few filters. big deal. looks like crap anyway. most of the pages using his "work" seem like warez waldo's or geospitties anyway.
no reverse support for older browsers, especially those that don't support javascript or only partially.
lastly, i just don't like his style a great deal. sure he's got "something" and he knows a little bit about design but i haven't done web design for a couple years now professionally and i could still crank out much better CSE validated, cross-platform, scaffolded code in a matter of a couple hours.
i will never begin to understand why so many people flock to certain sites touting how wonderful this designer or that designer is, hyping up their ego when there is neither substance nor good design rpesent in their work. it baffles me.
on the plus side, at least he's not abusing the blink tag and using every plug-in in the book. =)
~sigh~ why can't designers learn how to design?
steve
bob sucks
does anybody remember the stink microsoft raised about open standards in instant messaging clients? they were the underdog there, too...
Even more of a consideration than older browsers are the new breed of non-PC platform browsers running on QNX, WinCE, Palm and many other assorted appliance-type devices and set top boxes. These browsers will soon explode onto the Web and form a large proportion of all browser usage.
Often these browser support a subset of existing features found on the current offerings from Microsoft and Netscape. How do we square the circle of providing in-yer-face full functionality on the PC browsers and yet allowing for graceful fallback onto the much less functional browsers on other device types
--
I know this is sounds unproductive, but can someone explain to me what's so great about that site? To me it's unappealing, unimaginative, unstandardized, unnavagatitable... Oh I understand, it must be an artistic statement. It shows all the things you AREN'T supposed to do on a website. D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
Slashdot and Zeldman are having a real laugh over this one. This is an obvious setup. I think what they're really doing is categorizing the intelligence of /. user into 4 groups:
1. Clueless people who look at the site, think it's neat, and ask Zeldman a serious question.
2. Smart but angry people who love to flame at the slightest opportunity.
3. Paranoid people determined to expose the hidden motives behind everything.
4. Ultrageeks who have seen this trick before and, recognizing the brilliance, go on to ask an interesting question about web design.
So my question: Are there any examples of your actual web design? Can we see them?
See http://www.websitesthatsuck.com/badnavigation.html for more info.
--
As an example of this, many sites (including yours) use <font size=1> to acheive a font that is fairly uniform in pixel size across browsers. Anyone with a high-resolution screen will tell you that this is highly annoying, since it results in an almost unreadable font. Forcing netscape to use a larger font size often destroys the layout of the page. What's worse, some pages use dynamic fonts and other features to force this on the user.
As another example, many pages use the <table>, and <layer> to specify the exact size in pixels of portions of the page, and then put a little notice at the bottom ("This site best viewed at 800x600") or some such.
What are standards groups doing to fix this? Will I be looking at pages designed for 800x600 (or worse, 640x480) with my 1920x1440 screen forever? Will persons with laptops at 640x480 be unable to read the web soon? Will standards bodies ever require percentage-of-screen width and height specifiers, or even better, implement <table width=30ch> to specify sizes in relation to the current font size?
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
What effects will the 5k contest have on the future in your opinion?
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
I don't care about the "ugliness" of the site that many people complained about. I care about content rather than style. I'll return again and again to the ugliest site in the world, as long as it has content that I am interested in.
.GIF file. I have seen pages like that.)
As to whether the site has any content at all, I can not tell. It displays on my Sun workstation in a font that is only very slightly more readable than a "greeked" iconized xterm. That is, by putting my nose up against the CRT and squinting real hard, I can make out about one word in three.
Netscape on the Sun does not have the ALT-[ ALT-] commands to increase and decrease the font, so in order to read this page, I would have to either "Show Source" and read the HTML source, or go into my Netscape preferences and tell it "Reasonable size font, and use my font no matter what the idiot document says to use." This *sometimes* helps; I haven't tried it with this site. Since he's going so far as to specify his page at the pixel level, I suspect this might be one of the sites whose author has taken great pains to override all reader preferences.
I hate setting the "use only my font" config, because sites which use reasonable fonts often use them for reasonable purposes, and I don't want to lose that in my web browsing.
Normally, sites that are so thoroughly unreadable as this one, I hit the "Back" button on my browser. That's what I did with this one.
("Small favors" department: At least he didn't render his preferred page layout into a
(Desired feature for Mozilla: A "minimum font size" config tag which triggers a "display everything in Times-Roman 12, period, no exceptions" rule.)
Do you think men and women, including do-it-yourselfers and recreational designers create different kinds of web design, and if so, what can be done to take advantage of the best of both worlds?
Also, what do you think of triple bordered backgrounds?
Roanna Vessels of Clay -- Graphics Portal
Please visit ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition http://www.zc2zc3.st
AFAIK: The internet has already fallen victim to this type of thing. Internet II is an attempt to restore it to it's former information based roots. I'm pretty sure I2 is funded primarily by universities.
Finkployd
The whole font size situation could be greatly improved if more web designers would use relative fonts. Whether in CSS or font tags size="-2" can make the world a much nicer place. The css definitions on http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html use 12px and 10px values which just aren't portable enough. If they were relative I'd be able to have my default font set to whatever size I find happily viewable and the page designer could make his text "slightly smaller".
So the future of the web is difficult to read, ignores standards, has no clear navigation and is generally irritating and pointless?
I'm just worried that he's probably right.
PigPog.
Your site uses rollovers at almost every opportunity.
What do they add to the users experience ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
His site is really really bad. I wouldn't ask him anything about web design because I wouldnt want anything I do to look like that piece of crap.
Like I said in my other post this probably some kind of example of bad web design, so small fonts is something to be expected..
Well, the headline calls him a "web design luminary", right? That's among the most luminous pages I've ever seen.
I have no idea about you and your views, but I have read lots of the Alertbox columns by Jakob Nielsen.
Do you agree with him? Do you disagree? What about?
At least you share the use of TITLE attributes in hyperlinks (a good feature that Slashdot shouldn't chomp away).
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Which brings me to my question:
What percentage of your development time do you spend on testing your sites?
Jeff --
I know you're part of the whole Web Standards Project. A key plank in the platform seems to be fighting the placement of propietary interests above baseline support for standards, as seen in the recent IE 5.5 for Win-32 brouhaha. To me it seems that one could change a few words, and phrase the following question:
What is your stance on the apparent shift of the web from an open community to one ruled by territorialism and propetism, i.e. web and software patents?
Just curious Jeff....
----
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
And pah-rl also. And Puhrl also. But not Perl. Perl is great. Thanks to attack only what you do know. The only fact you're unable to spell it prove you've never even try to learn it.
sigmentation fault
Yes, I know that some people might consider this to be "stealing" content from site, where "payment" is the viewing of banners, but I can live with that :) NZ is a long way away as the IP flies.
You only notice how many of these there are around when you block them with a nice image of tux or similar.
While I see nothing wrong with pages with annoying javascript and bright colors that hurt my eyes -- there's always the Back button -- I do see something wrong with these people ignoring the standards. Most of his code is pretty clean, so it wouldn't take much work to fix the five or ten errors that the W3C validator returns.
I'm tired of web designers that think, "Hey, it works in MSIE and Netscape, who cares about the ohters?" This is especially amusing since one of the first links on the page is to the Web Standards Project. *sigh*
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I doubt it. When I looked at zeldman.com (never heard of the man before), all I saw was a neat, well-designed website. It looked good (except for the lame-ass intro) and I managed to find my way around, so what's the problem?
/. readers (who, browsing with lynx, probably haven't seen a decently designed website in ages: sorry to break it to you guys, but the web is turning into a commercial free-for-all; it's too bad but you'll have to learn to live with it) you'll want to avoid tactics like these.
:-)". Nevertheless, keep your geek rantings to yourself, as they are not relevant at all in the world of commerce, which is probably where this guy makes a living. Meanwhile, I'll just keep throwing karma points away (surprised I have any left).
Breaking the status bar? I'm sorry to break it to you, but no one really uses the status bar except for the few who actually know there's something of interest to be found there. How do you think those pr0n/ultimatewarez sites make a living? And as for the orange-as a designer I can tell you "there'th going to be a lot of orangeth thith theathon, hun". So the comment was correct..in six months time every website will be orange, and the hipster ones will have moved on to something else.
Then there's the small font: I'm browsing at 1024x768 on a 15" screen right now and I found the font perfectly legible, seeing as that it's Verdana (the one thing Microsoft ever got right). Of course on a linux machine this font isn't standard, but get a TTF plugin and install this font as it makes viewing a properly designed website much, much more pleasant.
As for the links, I don't know what the ***** you're talking about: in the commercial world, an intriguing link is supposed to entice visitors to click on it, and it usually works this way. Of course, if you're running a site for connoisseurs like most
I don't have any questions, however, because: he's running a connoisseur site that indulges in commercial behavior (it's a site I could sell to one of my clients easily) and his use of oranges and yellow "ith tho latht thentury-we're all moving to the drab greenth now
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
I am a webmaster at a federal agency -- many of my users still use browsers in libraries, so I care about standards, even ancient ones, a lot. What is the relationship of the Web Standards Project to W3? And do you really believe there is the possibility of making headway when MS seems to have a corporate policy of creating software that forces users to use other MS software?
(Yeah, I know this is a boring question, but I don't have anything to prove.)
TechNoir
I imagine that following the post by FascDot Killed My Pr, a lot of the posts will have a similar structure. So I'm defining a macro to avoid repetition:
#define WHY If you're such a hotshot web designer, whyUsing this definition, here is my question:
WHY does www.webstandards.org open links in a new browser window, when this behaviour is inconsistent with the rest of the Web, annoying, and strongly discouraged by the W3C?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Microsoft will have you know that IE is the standard.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I've seen his page... First a useless screen whose aim is to junk my history list... then an awful orange screen which became to blink between two close shade of this awful orange... then dumbass text hiding my statusbar... And stupid images also. This site is UGLY and USER-HOSTILE !
If the web is going to looks like that, I'm going to use gopher! I don't want to have to use such bad taste things, this guy is maybe a great Javascript coder, but he's a poor designer.
Simplicity and sobriety are virtues, not flaws. Thanks to not waste my precious bandwith with such junk.
I was willing to ask him if there are any hope of having a better web, more practical and information-centric. NO! With people like him having decisive voice, the web will go on to something centered on useless visual effect that don't even make a site more readable. More the contrary, actually.
sigmentation fault
I don't care about the little graphic at the top of the page that subsidises a web site so that I may have a more cost effective browsing experience.
What I do object to is when said ad holds my page load hostage for fourty seconds on a cable modem at that.
A standard I would like to see is a maximum load time for any web page element or something to that effect. Any ideas?
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Further more the standard is a proprietary trade secret that may not be reverse engineered.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Though destroying usability to the extent it is on Zeldman.com is pretty indefensible. It could almost be ameliorated if the site were a real visual knockout, but it's not.
$50k? $100k? What do these guys pay for your traffic? (C'mon, it's Open Source, might as well be open book, too . . .)
I find it hard to ask HTML questions to someone who has committed the cardinal sin of taking away the status bar with JavaScript.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
- A website should be available to as many users as possible
- A website should look as spanky as possible to the largest market
and do you encourage your clients to act accordingly?Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Do you think 6.0 will bring it close to IE's level of functionality?
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Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Jeff, I programmed for a web design company in which design issues totally trumped more practical concerns like download time. (In one case, I was forced to create absurdly complex html tables just so that the designer could get his one-pixel rounded corners on his notecard design.) What do you see as the appropriate balance between aesthetics and practical usability?
P.S. That company is now out of business, thank goodness!
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
(And on a smaller not: when do you think HTML will be ditched permanently?)
I can see where exciting design tricks are usful for, say, a magazine or TV show. But on the web, where I for one am working with a low resolution monitor and (often) a text based connection, and where others may be using anything from IE5 on a shiny new Mac to the default browser on a Palm VII, I have a hard time seeing the point in making flashy 'designed' web pages. The 'benefit' of having to turn off javascript just to be able to read the font that looked best on your monitor just doesn't work for me. But then again, I'm not the fancy web designer, I'm just a happy little page minimalist.
At least your pages seem to work okay when I disable the gadgetry -- that's an excellent start. And it also looks okay in Lynx -- an easy thing to do, but too often overlooked (as it translates into "looking good" on palmtops, for search engines, and on alternative browsers for e.g. the blind). I give you points for that. But I still don't see the point -- the benefit -- of all the flashiness. Maybe it's just my sense of aesthetics -- I like a nice clean simple site, without all the trappings (think photo.net. Different strokes...
I guess that's the gist of my question though: when there are so many benefits to having a straightforward, Lynx friendly site, and when it takes so much effort to get an "enhanced" site to degrade to the older level, what exactly do you gain by the effort? What, in short, makes it worthwhile?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
My personal biggest beef with the web today is the need for so many sites to force their webpages to be 600 pixels wide, 720 pixels wide, whatever. I have a 3200x1200 desktop available to me, and it's really stupid to see sites like Daily Radar, almost any newspaper site, etc. take up a teeny teeny portion of the page. What can be done to move away from the fixed-width mentality that so many people have today? Why do they do it, even? Because they are not capable of coming up with a "relative" design? What can be done to educate people on the merits of relative sizing? Don't you think that relativity is good, vs. "stylized" fixed-width pages?
Just one more reason to disable it - that and the flashing color front page (when moving the mouse over the random pixel graphic thing (wasted page, hello??))
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Then remove the stylesheet markup with DeCSS :-)
(before you flame or mod down, CTFL (click the fscking link))Will I retire or break 10K?
Mmm...or perhaps we can ask Jeff about why Mozilla and Netscape aren't html 4.0 compliant also.
Style sheets are one of the most useful things available today, but, they are unusable in major websites, thanks to Netscape's shitty rendering of them.
Too bad Opera is so damned weird. Dump the extra crap Opera, and give us that small, fast, compliant browser...
Btw, if you folks haven't seen IE for the Mac, you are really missing out. It is absolutely the best browser available.
"Don't try to confuse the issue with half truths and gorilla dust."
Bill McNeal (Phil Hartman)
What would you change, what would you add, what would you remove in Slashdot?
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I was so disgusted at the site I had to look around to see how bad it could get. After viewing serveral animated gif 'movies' the next one took me to the useless entry page. The lack of navigation is insane. I'm going to take web design advice from a guy with a site like that, I think not.
Remove the spam reference to email
I've heard a lot of people moaning about Slashdot's appearance, and let's face it... it's not stunning. In fact in looks pretty shyte the first few times you see it.
Having said that, it is probably the most functional 'forum' type site I have seen in my entire life, and I think that the general layout is, well, an acquired taste?
Thank you.
I've seen a lot of criticism of your Zeldman.com site here in these forums. I've been reading alistapart recently, and I think the design there is very pleasing to the eye.
Are you trying more experimental stuff with your peronal site that you wouldn't try with a commercial site like alistapart?
What other sites have you done recently that you are proud of?
Why haven't the dead ads been updated recently? No good ones coming in?
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Why do you hate underscores so much?
The one who's a troll here is the moderator. Yes, the web is not print. Graphical site designer should understand this. Each image is *LOTS* heavier than equivalent text when you must download it. Those who make a site totally unreadable as long as all image are not loaded miss the point -and that's what means web!=print. On a printed page, image sure make it pretty, on a web page it just make it frustrating as you must WAIT too long.
sigmentation fault
Quoting from his own website: "If your design demands a specific height, set it in points (not pixels)"
I work as a web programmer. The company where I work was recently acquired by a high-profile (for my location) communications firm. The new company has great print skills, but almost everyone here is old-school.
About once a day, I find myself telling one of the suits that "The web is not print."
My question: Do you have any suggestions for getting the traditional artists of the world to recognize the web as a new medium, and not just print-on-a-monitor?
I think there's too much concern on the web with form over content. Slashdot is a prime example, this is not the optimal form, but nevertheless they provide enough entertaining, timely, and relevant content that they have tons and tons of ridiculously loyal readers. This is because, of course, the best content is the sum of the users themselves, which /. achieves perfectly. <br>
And I think orange is ugly, so I don't dig zeldman's site. It's just too bright<br>
Here's some content for ya, if you care about your feedom at all, <a href="http://www.votenader.com/">vote for Ralph Nader!</a> <br>
And is he really a great web designer? He has a broken link right on the front page... http://www.zeldman.com/orson.html is what the "if movies had been websites" points to. And <a href="http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html" the mozilla link is broken too. </a><br>
What we need is a daily page done by an AI personality, now that'll be cool<br><br>
___________________________
Michael Cardenas
http://www.fiu.edu/~mcarde02
http://www.deneba.com/linux
hyperpoem.net
How hopeful are you that Microsoft can be coaxed into making IE
standards compliant? What exactly do you think Microsoft's motive was
in not supporting HTML 4.0 completely?
Does that mean that in six months the entire web will be.... ORANGE? Noooooooooooooooo!
The web changes, as we all know, at a blindingly fast rate.
Are the basic rules for good design the same now as the have always been? And are they likely to remain the same.
Technology changes, but do the rules for making good use of the technology also change, or are there at least some rules that you would say are pretty much cast in stone? If so, what?
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Obviously, one wants to reach as large an audience as possible, but not "lag behind" too far. How do you go about balancing the use of newer technology on a site without alienating users of older software, disabled users, and text-only browsers?
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Let me explain. Right now any Joe Schmoe can put up a web site, and have the potential to serve 100,000 pages a day. When INTERNET II comes along, we'll all be competing with expanded rich multimedia content, FMV, etc... that only large corporations have the ability to do right. HTML won't cut it anymore.
Will this kill the nature of the internet as we know it?
tcd004
Here's my Microsoft parody, where's yours?
Apparently.
Just what I expected, my browser's not compatable with the future. Damn it. I'll have to go invent a time machine instead. See you in ten minutes (your time). :)
Thad
Thad
I've read a few articles recently about how some developers see the future of the web in flash. Do you think the web will eventually become mostly flash (or some other vectorign program) oriented or do you see it remaining under the current HTML system. It seems to me that with the increasing public use of the web and their acquisition of bandwidth many of the more popular sites will turn to flash to spice things up. Personally, i can't stand the damn thing, what's your opinion?
Checkout taccom my worl war II simulator
Have you seen your own website recently? Eh....
What do you think of the demise of groups like swanky.org? Do you think youth interest in design has suffered as a result?
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
Maybe /. should interview some more.. progressive.. designers like toke and mschmidt for k10k.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
Flanders? Oh, please. His Web Pages that Suck site used to be a fairly blatant Mirsky/Stev0 rip-off that gave pointers on designing slick sites that shill whatever you're selling, and now it is a fairly blatant shill for the book he's selling. I love capitalism — bleah.
With sites like http://www.halfbrain.com/ and http://www.mywebos.com/, how far do you think will the integration of (X)HTML, CSS and ECMAScript go? Will this be our "new" desktop for the future?
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
I think there's too much concern on the web with form over content. Slashdot is a prime example, this is not the optimal form, but nevertheless they provide enough entertaining, timely, and relevant content that they have tons and tons of ridiculously loyal readers. This is because, of course, the best content is the sum of the users themselves, which /. achieves perfectly.
And I think orange is ugly, so I don't dig zeldman's site. It's just too bright
Here's some content for ya, if you care about your feedom at all, vote for Ralph Nader!
And is he really a great web designer? He has a broken link right on the front page... http://www.zeldman.com/orson.html is what the "if movies had been websites" points to. And the mozilla link is broken too.
What we need is a daily page done by an AI personality, now that'll be cool
___________________________
Michael Cardenas
http://www.fiu.edu/~mcarde02
http://www.deneba.com/linux
hyperpoem.net
For the designer, the web is full of compromises. How would you rank these conflicting goals in order of importance?
A) Usability
B) Entertainment
C) Robustness
D) Speed
E) Beauty
F) Accessibility
his site is ugly, hard to read, and i cannot believe he made it by "hand"?!? I made my website early 1997, 100% by hand, and i think it looks better than him! Also i'm reformating mine to display well in Netpositive and Voyager. I use W3C recommandations and that's all.
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BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Someday (hopefully within a couple months) I may have to deal with the slashdot effect, with my Homebrew MP3 player project, which is open source, but at the moment only in a just barely working state.
My question, specifically from your recent experience, is how should one deal with the slashdot effect, knowing that is coming.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
With the large division between the standard HTML and the HTML tags that broswers like IE5 and Netscape will use and other division such as the fragmentation of the XML development base, what can Internet community users, SysAdmins and other industry users do to promote a unified standards base for platforms such as HTML and XML. I know that the old "Don't use IE5 becuase of..." stuff simply isn't going to work in the real world. What I'm looking for is a real, meaningful way to unite users and developers to conform to true standard.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
Zeld-mon, I would just like to hear your two bits about Mozilla, not just as a standards compliant browser (which Gecko certainly is) but as an application deployment platform as some advocates/developers are claiming. If Mozilla does become such a beast, the nature of the game will almost certainly be changed, especially re: Microsoft's desktop domination. Do you see real potential for Mozilla to evolve into such a platform, or are the developers getting over-exuberant? - Rev.
Guys, I think zeldman.com is somekind of parody/example of how making a site look c00l can ruin the whole thing.. I mean, this guy is sopposed to be Guru Of Web (I've never heard of him before though), do you think he would make mistakes like tiny font, useless opening page, bad, blinky color, fucking the statusbar with javascript, using links with bad descriptions etc..
Adverts seemingly pollute every environment that opens up which is tiring to our minds as we have to cope with all this unrequested stimuli trying to grab our precious attention away from our natural desires and subvert them with pressure to consume that which we didn't know we wanted and certainly didn't care about.
.oO0Oo.
So my question is :
"Do you every long for a space that is advert free or do you hope one day that when I make my toast in the morning each slice of bread will carry one of your adverts?"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter