Slashdot Mirror
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 ;-)."
After reading that the site wouldn't make my eyes bleed I happily went and took a look but ugh! All that red text and faint type. My eyes are bleeding! The content on the site IS good though. An interesting read.
On each article page, there is a link labeled Permanent URL which you click to permanently bookmark the page. Now, i can't figure out how to get to a page in such a way where the permanent bookmark url is different than the page I'm viewing, but I'm sure that this is not good UI design. Why are all these URLs having to be reused? there is no good reason, especially with things like modrewrite. I've always found ALA to be useful, but often out of step with the true philosophy of the W3C. That being said, I think W3C HTML standards suck and are philosophically broken in the first place, so maybe he has a point.
Photos.
No, that's not a good reason. If I find the text too wide for comfort (and I often do), I *gasp* narrow the window.
On the other hand, not all users are going to be apt to do this and it's a courtesy to have the default behavior be the most readable on the most screens. Anyway, the techniques I described use max-width and an IE specific technique to accomplish the same in the CSS, which means that, unlike ALA, you can always narrow the window as much as you'd like. You can see it in action: http://www.viewfromhaiti.org.
Certainly, it's just as bad as using all the IE hacks for other CSS behaviors that people have come up with, but no worse.
Try to be a little more civil.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
Faint Text: Looks fine to me on three different monitors. Perhaps you should adjust your contrast?
/. would find my website rather trivial) Something of a middle ground can be found by using EMs to set the width of the text area as I have done with my personal site. By doing this the text column is resized along with the text size. Though the text size has to shrink to also shrink the column (though this too could be avoided with JS), it seems to be a good 85% of the time rule.
Fixed Width: It is a trade off. Yes, text could flow on forever until it fills the user's window width (which is very bad), or the text can be set to a reasonable fixed width, preventing users from resizing the text as desired (bad but less bad) but saving a lot of work for users that don't mind the choosen fixed width.
Final thought: (and this is not a plug in anyway because I am sure most of
Nice site (seriously!) (at least once I noticed that the link and the text didn't match :-)) But,
you note, I can't make it as *wide* as I want.
Better than an absolute fixed width, but still annoying.
Try to be a little more civil.
Huh? You stated an opinion, I disagreed. If disagreeing with you is uncivil, then you're not going to like this post either, I suppose. If you're objecting to the term "silly-ass", well, then, you shouldn't be hanging out on slashdot: it gets a lot stronger than that.
Uh... the day Slashdot links to Zeldman is the day I stop reading Slashdot... So... I guess you won't be here tomorrow? Zeldman is a true leader in web standards, and A List Apart has been an invaluable reference for this amateur web designer.