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?
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?
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 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?
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
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?
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower