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ALA 3 Goes Online

Posted by timothy on from the eyestrain-relief dept.

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 ;-)."

11 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Eyes ARE bleeding by angle_mark · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  2. Squint squint by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Gray text on gray background is good design?

    4pt font is good design?

    Physician, heal thyself!

  3. Are you fsking kidding me? by V.+Mole · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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...)

    1. Re:Are you fsking kidding me? by wowbagger · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      Yup. Good design.

      --
      www.eFax.com are spammers
    2. Re:Are you fsking kidding me? by TheViewFromTheGround · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
    3. Re:Are you fsking kidding me? by TheViewFromTheGround · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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
    4. Re:Are you fsking kidding me? by Brandybuck · · Score: 2, Funny

      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.

      Dear 12" monitor owner,

      I am sorry to hear that my use of a 933 pixel wide is causing you some distress. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to correct your problem. You see, our master web designers at www.aripapart.com have told us that the minor inconveniences of 21" monitor owners far outweigh the fundamental usability needs of 12" monitor owners. May I suggest you 'get with the program' and buy the 17" PowerBook and toss out that 12" iBook?

      Sincerely,
      R. J. Noyed

      "This site best viewed with a maximized browser window"

      --
      Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
    5. Re:Are you fsking kidding me? by V.+Mole · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  4. Permanent URL by metalhed77 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  5. My 1 Cent by TomGroves · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Faint Text: Looks fine to me on three different monitors. Perhaps you should adjust your contrast?

    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 /. 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.

  6. Re:Zeldman by Hammerikaner · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.