ALA 3 Goes Online

Qbertino writes "Jeffrey Zeldmans Alistapart ("ALA"), a very educative website for everything concerning webdesign, that also heavily promotes web standards, has come back online in it's third incarnation. As you might expect from one of the world leading web designers it works good in all standards compliant browsers and - other than recent attempts at webdesign - doesn't make your eyes bleed ;-)."

Comments

Squint squint

[Dancin_Santa]

Gray text on gray background is good design?

4pt font is good design?

Physician, heal thyself!

Are you fsking kidding me?

[V. Mole]

Let's see: low contrast type. Doesn't expand or shrink to fit into browser window. *plonk*.

This is supposed to be the paragon of web design? ALA has good articles and ideas. I wish they'd followed some of them in their redesign. (Their second incarnation was pretty good. I wonder what happened...)

Re:Are you fsking kidding me?

[wowbagger]

Fixed width content - check.
Setting a cookie for no adequately explored reason - check.
Poor contrast on fonts - check.

Yup. Good design.

Re:Are you fsking kidding me?

[TheViewFromTheGround]

Regarding fixed width designs: There are good reasons to use fixed width designs. The primary good reason to fix the width is that readers tend to suffer more-than-usual fatigue reading lines beyond the 65-80 character range. But there are much more elegant ways to go about doing this than what ALA is doing, and what's more, Zeldman has even linked to sites that explain the techniques.

Regarding the ALA redesign and Zeldman's design in general: It kinda sucks, for reasons everybody has mentioned. The guy knows the technical side of doing it very well, and knows how to explain the technical side in a way that's eerily clear and concise. But his aesthetic and design choices leave something to be desired.

One of the problems here is that there's a sacrifice going on here -- the do-anything-for-validation sacrifice. So what if a technique that should validate (such as some of the techniques to cut line length to aid in readability) in reality doesn't? And more specifically, I think that the XHTML side of the validation should be the more important. The CSS part is trickier business, and lots of hacks are needed, but the point is that the document structure should be coherent, as simple as possible, and reflect the content of the document, and that's what the XHTML does.