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?
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
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?
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?
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?
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What's with that small font www.zeldman.com, haven't you read any (web) usability guides?
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?
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.
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).
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
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?
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
What would you change, what would you add, what would you remove in Slashdot?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
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?
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?
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?
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We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower