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Jeffrey Zeldman Bites Back
from the gives-as-good-as-he-gets dept.
1) Here's my question:
(Score:5, Insightful)
by FascDot Killed My Pr
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?
Jeffrey:
I'll answer this one piece by piece.
"If you're such a hotshot web designer."
Never claimed to be. Roblimo wrote that glowing description. It's not surprising that some of you, who have no idea what I do, were pissed off when those words of high praise took you to a very simple, low-bandwidth, personal site.
I wish Rob had said "Zeldman is a co-founder of The Web Standards Project" (WaSP), and had explained what the WaSP does, maybe even mentioning the role we played in getting Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and begin building Mozilla around the standards-compliant Gecko core. I'm guessing people would have overlooked my supposed "design sins" or their distaste for the color orange on my personal site if they had a better idea about what I actually do.
For those who don't know, the WaSP organized a petition drive to persuade Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and build its new browser around Gecko. Then-group-leader George Olsen of WaSP, along with ThunderLizard's Jim Heid, got 2,000 developers to sign the petition. Netscape is a company that listens - at least, for the last two years, it has been listening - and you all know the result: an upcoming browser that is designed to fully comply with HTML 4, CSS-1, the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript.
No disrespect to Roblimo either. I dig the guy. And what he said is true in a sense. I *am* a web designer and writer, and a lot of the work I've done over the past five years *has* gotten imitated, for better or worse. For instance, oddly enough, the original Mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org) was copied from the simple HTML-and-CSS layout I did The Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org/): from the technique, to the color palette, to the crude four-pixel black outlines around content areas. Don't bother checking; the new Mozilla layout has evolved away from that original look, though it still bears trace elements of the original design. A lot of you probably do remember the original Mozilla layout. I'm sure when Roblimo saw it, he realized it was copied from http://www.webstandards.org and I think that's the kind of thing he was referring to in his overly kind introduction to my work.
By the way, I wasn't upset by what Mozilla did; I was flattered by it. You may think it is ugly design, though I'm sure that none of you said so to Mozilla because you believe in the project. It's weird to me that the same people who dig Mozilla would be rude in their comments to someone who, at least in a small way, helped influence the direction of that browser, and who also influenced the initial DESIGN of that project, but whatever. I also talk with Microsoft, because the goal of WaSP is to get standards in *all* browsers, and the fact that I talk to engineers at that company may make me evil incarnate in your book. I can deal with that. If we get better browsers, I'll be satisfied.
I do get copied a lot and often those copies are better than the original. In that sense "VIEW SOURCE" functions like "OPEN SOURCE." ;) I am happy when someone takes an idea of mine and makes it better (and their own).
"why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design"
I've been designing websites for five years. I don't claim to be a genius and I'm far from the best designer on the planet, but your take on cardinal sins of a profession you do not participate in is about as meaningful as my comments on your programming decisions would be.
You are parroting Jakob Nielsen or some other expert whose work you've read. You haven't read my work on the same subject (no problem) and you don't know my work as a designer (no problem). Just as in programming, design is about decisions. A designer never sins. He/she makes informed decisions. If you get to know the work, you may understand why those decisions were made. If you never bother to engage with the work - if you merely believe that all design must conform with a small set of rules written by one or two people - you don't understand the nature of the thing you are criticizing. Especially if you spend all of five seconds looking at it, and then rush to be the first to post a rant. There are rules of grammar, too, and James Joyce threw them all out. True, I ain't him. But I am me. All designers make decisions, and if the entire web looked like http://www.useit.com I don't think that would be such a great thing. Anything that departs from the look of http://www.useit.com is violating at least a few of Jakob's "rules," and that's the nature of the beast.
"Putting [up] an 'entry page' that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?"
The bandwidth sucked is exactly 4K. I think you can handle it.
The "entry page" is a temporary placeholder while I rethink the front end of my personal site. Notice the words "temporary," "placeholder," and "personal." The previous front page was navigational in nature, and it is archived at http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html . The name refers to the fact that the page revealed a bug in recent builds of Mozilla. I have left it online so the Mozilla folks can use it to track down and fix that bug, which they are doing now.
Recently, I've been focused on WaSP and A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/), a web design magazine and mailing list I co-founded with Brian Platz. The content on my personal site (275+ pages) has not been my most recent focus, so I determined a while back that it was silly to stop the visitor with a primarily navigational page. I should explain that some people visit zeldman.com for entertainment like The Ad Graveyard; a completely different audience visits for web design info, such as the Ask Dr Web tutorial; and so on. To accommodate those very different visitors, I initially had a core page that was navigational. I didn't put real content on page one, because I was accommodating maybe six completely different audiences, and there was nothing in all that content that would appeal to ALL of them. On http://www.alistapart.com/ I start with content on page one, because the audience is more unified.
Even that old navigational page (http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html), with all its rollovers etc., was very low-bandwidth. I recently got to look at it while stuck at an airport in Stockholm. The airport had five Windows boxes sharing one 56K modem. I looked at some of my favorite sites, and they were all crawling onto the screen. I was pleased that my own front page loaded instantly. I design for low bandwidth, which explains why my work rarely looks like that of "such a hot shit designer." Back to the point. I haven't yet figured out how to restructure the front end of my site, so I put up a 4K placeholder with a bone-simple rollover and a 6 second refresh to the single page at my site that I have been focusing on lately.
Now you know why I have a temporary entry page; now you know why it does "nothing" (it is temporary, and what it does is redirect you); and now you know that it does not suck bandwidth.
How it "makes it difficult to 'back' out of the site" is a mystery to me, so I can't comment on that clause in your question. Personally I find database driven pages much harder to navigate and back out of than 4K html pages. And with browsers that suck, frames-based pages can also be tough to navigate. My 4K page is frameless HTML.
2) I have a question:
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Skinka
What's with that small font www.zeldman.com, haven't you read any (web) usability guides?
Jeffrey:
Yes, I've read them, yes I've written on the subject, yes yes yes.
Along with another WaSP member, I helped influence Microsoft to make ALL web text resizable by the user in IE5/Mac for reasons of accessibility and usability, and we are hoping to get the same from Mozilla. (At the moment, this feature is only available in IE5/Mac. It should be in every browser. It's not in the Windows version of IE and it's obviously not in the current version of Navigator.)
Why small fonts? Personal design decision on a personal site. You can enlarge the type in some browsers, not all. That day is coming.
There are methods of CSS that allow you to resize type in *all* browsers.
Why do I often avoid those methods?
Because they are not supported in most "CSS-capable" browsers.
Absolute font-size keywords are broken in Navigator 4 (all platforms) and IE5/Windows.
Percentages and ems are broken in Netscape 4.
Points are meaningless on computer screens, and the reliance on points in Style Sheets is a widespread authoring error.
Until all browsers support standards, designers will be stuck using pixels or FONT SIZE tags. Or simply making no effort at all to control the appearance and size of type on the web page. If this bothers you, join The Web Standards Project.
(Warning: it is orange. If you "can't get past the color" then I guess you'll have to let big browser companies determine the fate of the web.)
Unless you design web sites every day, you have no idea of the compatibility nightmares involved. But in your own work, I'm sure you have plenty of examples of brain-dead decisions by others that force you to use hacks and workarounds. It's the same in web design.
At the moment, the main text at http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html (the one page in all my work that most Slashdotters seem to have looked at) is laid out with ems. This is wonderful, scalable technology. You can easily enlarge or reduce the type in just about any browser.
Except, of course, that it doesn't work at all in most versions of Navigator 4. If you're using Navigator - and you know you are - you will see large ugly type, not the type treatment I intended. Until we have standards, that's just the way it will be.
3) Not to flame,
but...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mr.nobody
I find it hard to ask HTML questions to someone who has committed the cardinal sin of taking away the status bar with JavaScript.
Jeffrey:
Another cardinal sin.
Hmm. Let's see.
The status bar *does* reveal the url of the page it links to - just like an untreated status bar would do. It also provides ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND COMMENTARY. I guess that's a bad thing. I can't see why, but I guess I'll take your word for it. URL = good, URL + additional information = bad. Because you say so.
The title tag also provides additional information, but Question #12 told me that that was okay, even good. Whew! That's a relief.
4) where's the interview
(Score:4, Interesting)
by geekpress
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!
Jeffrey:
I almost always design for low bandwidth.
I was creative director at a web firm and had designed a layout with thin black borders (yes I do this same thing over and over again) for a database driven site that would be creating tables on the fly. The design effect would not render in Navigator, but the page still looked fine in Navigator, even without those little black outlines.
It was possible to FORCE Navigator to display the effect by surrounding every table with an additional, empty table. That is sometimes okay, obviously - I've been doing it since we could begin applying rudimentary styling to tables - but on a large page full of data, it would unnecessarily increase the bandwidth per page, force all browsers to burn cycles as they calculated the appearance of complex table-in-table displays, possibly cause display errors, and completely yoke the content to the presentation, making it that much harder to fix later, when we have better browsers.
So I told the company president it was a usability nightmare and a waste of resources and bandwidth and therefore not worth doing.
He told me to do it anyway.
So I quit my job and started my own company.
Rounded edges, high bandwidth, all that stuff can be fine in the right situations, as long as alternatives are provided and rules of accessibility are respected. Usually I persuade my clients to go in the low-bandwidth direction, and I almost always go low-bandwidth on the noncommercial sites I do (zeldman.com, http://www.webstandards.org/ and http://www.alistapart.com/ ).
But high bandwidth is fine for the right audience. Consider http://www.praystation.com, which is a brilliantly designed site by Joshua Davis. It's amazing work. The audience for that site is primarily Joshua's fellow designers, and most of them have T1 or DSL access. Since the site's goal is to push design as far as it can go on the web, and since the audience is known to have fast connections and a desire to see great design, there is absolutely nothing wrong (and lot right) with the higher-bandwidth road taken by this project.
5) Optimism?
(Score:5, Funny)
by Chalst
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?
Jeffrey:
It varies by the hour. Sometimes I think they are going to do this and simply have not committed to it because they're not sure they can pull it off. Sometimes I suspect that as the current market leader (guys with the most users) they think they don't have to bother with this. ("Our way *is* the standard." That kind of thinking.) And sometimes I reckon that they're doing this to fuck up Mozilla. ("You're going to support standards? Well, we have more users. You lose.") I don't *know* what they're thinking, but I suspect that different people there are thinking combinations of all the above.
I do know there are engineers there who are committed to supporting standards. Not only because I've met some of them through my work with WaSP, but also because - in the case of IE5/Mac - they've actually pulled it off. Remember, Microsoft (along with Netscape, Sun, invited experts, etc.) helped come up with these standards in the first place. Why would you design blueprints and then not follow them when you build the house? The engineers who participate in the standards process are committed to complying with standards. Some people in management may not be. Or they may be delaying, for short-sighted competitive reasons, or from fear of committing until they are sure they can do it right.
HTML 4 - the LAST HTML - includes dozens of accessibility improvements, and it is insane for any company not to fully support that. Without full support for HTML 4, millions of web users get hurt. That's morally wrong, and it's also just plain bad for business. I think that in time, all browser companies, including Microsoft, will come to see that. I also think the W3C's recent hiring of a conformance manager (http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=517) signals that the W3C will soon take a more active role in "helping" companies get with the program, support standards, and stop screwing up developers and web users in a game where everybody - including the browser companies - eventually loses.
6) Balancing Technologies
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Proteus
As you are no doubt aware, the technology that drives web site design is advancing rapidly. However, there are still a lot of users who run older browsers, or prefer to use text-only browsers such as Lynx.
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?
Jeffrey:
Using HTML 4, ALT tags, and the TITLE tag goes a long way toward achieving this goal.
So does using CSS for type, instead of FONT FACE and FONT SIZE tags that yoke content to presentation.
I do both these things, and all the other little things you have to do, for instance with framesets. I think there may be some really old (1996) framesets at zeldman.com where I left out full content inside the noframes tags. I'm cleaning that up as quickly as I can. At ALA http://www.alistapart.com/), wherever I used framesets, I included the full text inside the noframes tags, and I also included TEXT versions of all articles.
The next stage is full separation of content from structure, and that means using HTML 4 and CSS (and eventually, replacing HTML 4 with XHTML; and eventually, migrating to XML).
We can't safely do that yet. Gecko is still in development, Netscape 4 has appalling "support" for CSS, IE5/Windows has better but far from complete support, and the only released browser that gets it right - IE5/Mac - has a 6% market share.
SOON. Not soon enough, but SOON, we will look back on this era of stupidity and laugh. Oh, how we will laugh. This is the TRON era and we are striving to reach the MATRIX era.
7) Reverse scenario question...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jonny Royale
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?
Jeffrey:
Yes.
LOW SRC was a funky old tag from Netscape (dating back to Netscape 1.1) that allowed you to slip a low-bandwidth image into place, and then have it replaced by the more bandwidth-intensive image when the latter finished downloading. For people with very slow connections, it was a useful hack. It also enabled creative web designers to add a certain amount of "SFX magic" (cough) to even the most primitive pages, viewed by the oldest browsers, under the most adverse conditions. That's gone. Too bad. I miss it.
Because of browser offsets in all released versions of Navigator and most versions of Explorer, I wish the "four horsemen of non-validation" (leftmargin, topmargin marginwidth and marginheight) had made it into HTML 4.0 transitional. We won't need them eventually, but until the browsers are smarter, we still do need them. The W3C is always ahead of what the browsers can deliver, of course; but by discouraging these dumb proprietary tags, the W3C has put us in the position where PAGES THAT WILL NOT WORK without these tags will fail at http://validator.w3.org. That kind of failure discourages developers from building standards-compliant pages. It is a small thing, and it is transitional, but DURING THE TRANSITION, I would have liked to see those four stupid tags get approval with a benevolent sigh.
On the other hand, designers who know what they are doing may include these tags and ignore those validation errors, but don't tell the W3C I said so.
Given the brain-dead way Navigator 4 and IE4/5/Windows handled absolute font size keywords in CSS, I *sometimes* wish font size tags were not discouraged YET. I hate them and hardly ever use them, but (for instance) there's no way to get small type in Linux that is actually READABLE without relying on these dumb old non-standard tags. What I really wish in this case, of course, is that Netscape and Microsoft hadn't fucked up this simple CSS technology. So I take the FONT SIZE tags thing back. Uh, never mind. I just wish Netscape and Microsoft had gotten CSS right the first time.
8) Banners
(Score:5, Interesting)
by TheTomcat
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?
Jeffrey:
There are several issues here. One is, a lot of the best work is done as a labor of love, and always will be. Those who need a revenue model before they are willing to even think about working will lose one of the golden opportunities of the web, which is free expression and the building of communities, regardless of financial issues. For instance, Slashdot was born as a community and still is one. Eventually, Slashdot got into a position where it could make money, but Slashdot is true to itself and was not corrupted or changed by any commercial considerations. So it is possible to make a good thing and not blow it when the cash register starts jingling. But a lot of other sites and communities have turned to dreck when money was involved.
We all agree that banners suck - Roblimo even wrote an article for ALA on that subject, back when ALA was just getting launched. With a big enough readership, banners *can* be profitable, as they are at Slashdot. But I agree that most of us just hate 'em.
Sponsorships are another possible means of revenue. "This issue of Webmonkey brought to you by Hewlett-Packard." With an entertaining HP minisite available at the click of a link, for those who care. Kaliber 10000 (http://www.k10k.net) has gotten Apple sponsorship, and all that means is, there's a tiny Apple link in the top right hand corner of the front page. If you click it, you get a popup window with text on why the site's designers like their Macs, and links to some current movies in Apple Quicktime format.
The Cluetrain guys have spoken about this model of corporate sponsorship as well.
I think about it sometimes. For instance, http://www.alistapart.com/ could be "brought to you by" Macromedia or Adobe. But to tell the truth, I don't really pursue this idea because I'm not motivated by money when it comes to creating web content. I simply want to create or choose the right content, and totally control it, and I'm not sanguine that I could do that if I *had* corporate sponsorship. Thinking about it some more is on my to-do list, but it's about 500 layers down in the list. I make enough money designing websites that I don't worry about "revenue models" for my content sites. It is a real issue, though. Just one I haven't bothered with personally, yet.
9) Jeff, your CSS suck
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Nicolas MONNET
I quote from your website:
H1 {font: bold 24px verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin-top:
0xp;}
H4 {font: 12px verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px;
margin-bottom:
10px;}
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?
Jeffrey:
Refer to the answer to Question 2. Also refer to this Word from the WaSP column:
http://www.webstandards.org/wfw/ieah.html
The best way to style text - and the way the W3C recommends - is to use relative sizes or absolute size keywords.
Both these methods are completely broken in Navigator 4. Totally frickin' useless. Don't shoot the messenger. Netscape agrees, and that's why they threw out their old rendering engine and started from scratch.
And absolute size keywords are stupidly mis-supported in IE4/5 for Windows, where "medium" means large, and "small" means medium.
Faced with this maddening stupidity on the part of browser makers, designers/developers have two choices:
Do not style text at all. Have a nice day.
*OR* rely on pixels, which work in all "CSS-capable" browsers.
I sadly choose the latter until the browsers fully comply with W3C standards.
As to POINTS versus pixels, points are absolutely meaningless on the web, and the fact that they are used by thousands of developers who should know better proves only how little CSS is understood by the development community.
Certain point sizes may work on your platform in your style sheet. That proves that certain point sizes work on your platform in your style sheet. Cross-platform it is not transportable, and points are print-based units of measurement that have no meaningful relationship to the wonderful world of monitor resolution.
For a good discussion of CSS problems, see Todd Fahrner's "Beyond the Font Size Tag: Practical HTML Text and Styling" at http://style.metrius.com/font_size /livetext.html (Unfortunately, even some of *THESE* techniques do not work in more recent versions of Navigator 4.)
In a few months, there will be exactly two browsers that get CSS-1 right: Mozilla/Nav 6 for all platforms, and IE5/Mac which we have now. Since neither has dominant marketshare, developers will still face huge obstacles when trying to do something as SIMPLE and BASIC as size text on the web. Many will stick with pixels, which are the only CSS technique that actually WORKS across browsers and platforms.
In addition to all these nightmarish problems with our browsers, there are special challenges with Linux, because unless Linux users install additional scalable fonts, you can follow all the rules for good CSS, and avoid "problem" font sizes, and still create pages that look jaggy or are unreadable on a lot of people's machines. I worry about this all the time, but I don't have a solution for it. I have actually gone back to using the stupid The way to advance the medium is to get absolute font size keywords and relative font sizes right in CSS, finish implementing HTML 4, and give us the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript. (And then wait two years for users to upgrade.)
10) Pixel based alignment and HTML
(Score:4, Insightful)
by mcelrath
One of the most disturbing trends that I see in web design these days is the trend toward trying to control layout at the pixel level. As HTML (Hypertext Markup) was not intended to be a graphics language, what is your comment on this?
Jeffrey:
Separation of style and content is the way forward.
The problem is the browsers.
When I revised my "Ask Dr Web" tutorial at http://www.zeldman.com/askdrweb/, along with other pages at http://www.zeldman.com/, to use CSS layouts instead of tables, certain versions of Navigator 4 began crashing.
Actually crashing from basic CSS-1.
I wrote about this at A List Apart, ("The Day the Browser Died") and because of this, Netscape invested some time and resources to fixing some of these bugs in Navigator 4. It didn't catch them all, and it didn't catch them in Linux. These bugs will never be fully fixed in Navigator 4, because Netscape is wisely spending its energy to finish the Mozilla browser. Unfortunately, this means that Netscape users will continue to face serious usability hazards throughout the web until Netscape 6 is released ... *OR* it means that developers will continue to use TABLES for layouts for the next two years (as Jakob Nielsen has predicted).
If you look at these pages - http://www.zeldman.com/steal.html or http://www.zeldman.com/icon.html are other examples - you will see that we are talking about extremely BASIC layouts. An expert from the CSS pointers group actually volunteered hours of her time trying alternate combinations of the very basic CSS on those pages to see if she could find ways to stop Netscape from crashing. She could not; neither could I. Netscape did what it could for its 4.0 users, but it can't do anything more until the next generation is released.
On my personal site I made the tough decision to leave these pages as-is. I don't have time to recode them all using tables.
You can agree or disagree with that decision.
Linux folks can either use the Mozilla or Opera betas to navigate those pages in safety and comfort.
It's worth noting that W3C pages also crashed Netscape 4, for the same reason.
What happens when Netscape's browser is this badly damaged? I get hate mail from people who don't understand the issues involved. I also got a letter of thanks from Netscape's Eric Krock, because good companies WANT us to help them find bugs in their software.
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.
See above for the explanation as to why developers are stuck using 1994 technology to support late-1990s browsers. The same questions, the same answers.
The good thing - the ONLY good thing - about the font size tag is that it is user-resizable. The rest of this has been answered above.
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.
Right, although in some cases it is justified.
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.
Yes, that is usually a bad design decision. Whenever possible, I use what Glenn Davis (WaSP and Project Cool co-founder) calls "liquid" design ... design that reflows to exactly fit the visitor's monitor. That's almost always a better way to go. Examples of my liquid designs include http://www.alistapart.com/, http://www.the-adstore.com, and most of zeldman.com. If you dig long enough in zeldman.com, you'll come upon pages older than the NYC subways, that simply use BAD design ... though at the time, it wasn't all that bad.
Liquid design is not always appropriate but it is generally best.
What are standards groups doing to fix this?
Nothing. The W3C can't make better or more intelligent designers out of people, and neither can the WaSP, whose sole purpose is to agitate for W3C standards in browsers (and eventually in web authoring tools).
We can try to lead by example. http://www.webstandards.org/ is liquid (aside from the front page, which is "semi-liquid" owing to the large low-rez graphic) and it validates.
MEMBERS of standards groups can write articles on the subject and hope that people read them. Of course, if people "can't get past" a 4k splash page, they will not learn about my articles on the subject.
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?
Standards bodies can recommend certain authoring practices, and they can develop standards that make such practices possible, but they cannot enforce good authoring.
11) Evaluate Slashdot
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch
What would you change, what would you add, what would you remove in Slashdot?
Jeffrey:
It's a community and it works. It has achieved visibility, notoriety, and even commercial success without giving an inch. Pretty awesome achievement. What would I change?
Sometimes the longer threads take a long time to load, due to back-end technology, platform and server issues. The technology works better on Linux than it does on my platform of choice (Mac OS) but, hey, that's okay.
I know you want me to comment on the design. Design is subjective. Black backgrounds and teal are not my favorite color scheme (though I used black backgrounds at the 1995 Ad Graveyard (http://www.zeldman.com/ad.html) and the January 1997 Furbo Filters so who am I to talk? The main thing I was trying to do at Furbo was get CSS to work - and to let people know about Craig Hockenberry's and my Furbo Filters, which were the only Photoshop plugins at the time that dealt with the web-safe color palette - at least to our knowledge.)
I might change the color scheme and some other things if Rob Malda went on a crack run and asked me to redesign Slashdot, but that ain't likely to happen. And I think the design of Slashdot is just fine. It focuses you on the breaking stories, allows you to read more (or not), and provides access to almost everything else on the site via small navigation units. In terms of usability it is damn good, and it has plenty of attitude.
Of course, it commits the "cardinal sin" of teal, but I can get past that.
12) Do you agree with Nielsen?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch
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?
Jeffrey:
I agree with his comments on oral sex and wearing white after Labor Day.
And I like that he can get $25,000 to talk for an hour. I'll do the same for half that amount.
I also agree with Jakob that most websites should be usable by as many people as possible.
What I have done about that is help found The Web Standards Project, so we can actually achieve that goal instead of using duct tape and lasagna to build sites that work for "most" people. And I try to make my pages accessible in spite of the limitations of current browsers and some of the cross-platform issues discussed above.
If you are interested in my views, you can read them at http://www.alistapart.com/, Adobe.com (here, http://www.adobe.com/we b/columns/zeldman/20000320/main.html, for instance), http://www.webstandards.org/ and of course at http://www.zeldman.com/. If you can get past the 4k splash page.
At least you share the use of TITLE attributes in hyperlinks (a good feature that Slashdot shouldn't chomp away).
Thanks! The reason Slashdot chomps title tags is probably because they are not supported in Netscape yet. They are an important usability feature, and in some browsers they also offer nifty low-grade special effects - along with the opportunity for contextual ampliciation or ironic commentary.
jeffrey
Can't act. Can't sing. Can dance a little.
http://www.zeldman.com
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.happycog.com
http://www.webstandards.org
What Am I Missing Here? (Score:3)
I don't see the URL. I only see the "additional" information. I've got some pocket change. I'm willing to buy a clue if I need one...
John S. Rhodes
WebWord.com [webword.com] (Usability Vortal)
mucking with font size and style (Score:3)
I spend a significant amount of time configuring my browser to use a font style and size that, when combined with my monitor, video card, OS, and lighting environment, causes me the least eyestrain. My choice on my Mac at work is different than my choice on my Linux box at home. I'd appreciate it if you would respect that.
Sure, for headers and side notes and the like get fancy, but for the main body of text please leave my preferences intact.
(Yes, it took me a while to learn that lesson, and you may find a page on one of my sites that I haven't updated since I learned it; that's laziness, not hypocracy, on my part.)
Dave Siegal Anyone? (Score:5)
Hey, does anyone remember David Siegal? 5 years ago or so he was semi-influential. I remember his take on these portal pages was that they were absolutely vital to a good website.
I also remember that Siegal (Siegel?) came off as a pompous horse's ass on his website: http://www.davidsiegal.com
I think he published a book, too -- something about influentual web design -- I dunno.
And he had some weird-ass essay back in 1994 or so -- "The Balkanization of the Web"
Whatever happened to Siegal? If you go to his site and poke around, you'll find that the guy is a certified loony-tune. He had all sorts of bizarre, pompous ideas about web design and -- oddly enough -- writing screenplays. He started promoting his '9-act screenplay structure' and then explained that if you didn't agree with the 9-act structure, you didn't understand it -- go back and read it again.
He used to have a dining journal, too -- all his appointments with famous people, what they (and he) ate, and what they talked about.
And then, suddenly, silence. He stopped updating his dumb journals, stopped pontificating, and didn't complete his 9-act screenplay structure page.
Anyway. Why mention this? Well, the idea that slashdotters -- much like Siegal in halycon days -- complaining to Jeff about "cardinal sins". I mean, what the hell? -- who set the rules about this stuff? And which pope decreed the sins of web design? David Siegal? Berners-Lee? And we're not talking minor sins -- we're talking cardinal sins -- big ones.
Man, I'd like to get the 10 commandments of web design. I hate to sin with this shit -- and cardinal sins? Whoa-boy, not me. I'm just a little Cold Fusion/PHP peon. I don't want to get involved in no cardinal sinning.
"You'll burn in hell for that 4K entry page."
Damn, I'm starting to sweat. "Father? Father? Forgive me, for I have created a portal."
"Was it a big portal?"
"Um, well, 4K, I think."
"Okay, keep it under 8,000 bytes -- " whispering -- "any more, and we'd have problems."
"Father?"
"Yes, my son?"
"Bless me, please."
"In the name of the Father."
"Shit, thanks."
"Don't mention it."
So where o where is David Siegel? Has he Forsaken Me?
Siegal? Siegal? You pompous fuck! Where art thou? Thou hast forsaken thy flock! Come back, save us from bad design!
you did not design mozilla.org (Score:4)
Well, that's really interesting, but I'm afraid it's just not true at all.
I designed and implemented the mozilla.org web site. It was not copied from your site, because I've never heard of you, or your site. (I've never heard of your petition either, but that's another matter entirely.)
On the other hand, the mozilla.org web site is just not very complicated: how many web sites have you seen that have a menu on the left and content on the right? I'd say, ``most of them.''
If I was inspired by any site, it was probably gimp.org [gimp.org], but mozilla.org didn't end up looking much like that in the end.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
While I was in charge of mozilla.org, for that first year and a half, the site did not use CSS at all. Nor did it use any non-default font faces or sizes (except headings.) In fact, I was quite adamant that all documents on mozilla.org follow a style that rejected all the newest incompatible flavor-of-the-week bells and whistles that had shown up on the web in the last few years. I still care that documents be readable in Netscape 1.1. This was to the vocal dismay of people who were writing documents for the site, who thought that my insistence on consistency was an unnecessary hurdle for them.
You can read my style guide at http://www.mozilla.org/README-style.html [mozilla.org].
Uninformed Fellow Indeed (Score:3)
Bullshit.
*Right Now* Opera v3.6 gets CSS1 more 'right' than MSIE5.
Opera 3.6 gets CSS1 more right than IE5 FOR WINDOWS. Like he said, IE5 FOR MACINTOSH is the only browser currently shipping which supports CSS-1 completely. Yes, "completely" means more right than Opera.
In addition, it happens to have a pretty cool, very customizable interface. And it's the fastest rendering browser around. (This is just my subjective opinion, but IE5 for Mac is noticably faster than IE 5 Windows, which I am quite sure was the previous fastest browser available.)
In case anyone thinks I'm into Macs or something (God forbid!), no I don't own one, and no, I could never get used to surfing the web with only one mouse button. But trust me--if you haven't seen it, IE5 for Mac is one damn fine program.
As for Jeffrey Zeldman, believe it or not, he actually knows more about browser standards compliance than you do.
Points versus pixels (Score:3)
"Makes it difficult to back out" (Score:4)
[Orig] ===> [Entry] *redirect* ===> [Main page]
When you first navigate to the site, you land on Entry. After n seconds, you get redirected to Main page. While on main page, you wish to visit the last site you navigated to, [Orig]. So you hit Back, perhaps having forgotten [Entry], perhaps simply expecting that page not to be "in the way". "Back" works by taking you to the last URL the BROWSER requested, not the last URL YOU requested, so you go from right to left and land on Entry, and then get redirected back to Main, the page you were trying to BACK OUT OF.
This is nothing short of painful for those of us who actually KNOW how to use our browsers (and know, for example, that the Back button can take you back more than one site at once if you know how to use the dropdown list). For naive users it's dumbfounding. I believe some commercial sites use this fact intentionally to keep people on their page. And that's why it's TERRIBLE web design. If you aren't at least aware of this effect, I don't see how how can be much of a web designer.
Vector Based Pretty Stuff (Score:3)
Anyway, vector-based rendering seems most logical solution for the web but surely there is more efficient way to send the information over, rather than acii files? Perhaps browsers should allow for html.Z, shtml.Z or some sort of standardized compression format. Client processors are surely fast enough to handle unsipping files on the fly. This whole huge column of posts would zip very nicely, I'm sure.
Oh Gosh, not .Z ! (Score:3)
Perhaps browsers should allow for html.Z
Please, please not .Z. The .Z format is the GIF [burnallgifs.org] of file compression: it's encumbered by U.S. Patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts.
or some sort of standardized compression format
Ahhh, that's better. Use .gz, which is the format that XML systems are beginning to output anyway (Gnumeric spreadsheets are gzipped XML files). Did you know that some FTP servers support dynamic gzipping and un-gzipping?
Web Usability (Score:4)
It's nice to take a breath from all the "Pshockwave Psychos" and "Image freaks". I'd like to incorporate many more design ideas (even if they are crude, it renders well on my brain as well on the screen) on my site Media-Mixer [media-mixer.com]. It's very nice to be able to sponge some knowledge from someone who gets techincal but is nowhere near as airheaded as Brute Force Art Design people.
The Face -= o_O
Sorry, the flames of your design were justified. (Score:3)
...No?
...Funny that, I don't either.
Sorry, I think you'll find that the truth is the opposite of what you're trying to portray: Slashdotters like to cite Nielsen as an authority on how to do it right because we feel *he* speaks for *us*. We're not taking what he says on faith; most of it is things we've all said ourselves from time to time, and we're damn glad that there's at least one high-profile Web designer prepared to say it, and make a convincing case for it too.
Since your pages are personal, you're not obliged to make anyone like them, but personally I can't see the point of deliberately publishing something in a way that puts potential readers off. I know I reach straight for the "back" button when I see those cardinal sins.
--
I'm sorry, Jeff. (Score:4)
Another way to conduct interviews (Score:3)
Oral Sex (Score:3)
ciao,
-rvr
Hmm... what about Opera? (Score:5)
Whats going on?
I mean they currently have the #1 Windows browser for CSS support in release, and if you compare the lists of what will be done, Opera 4 is going to flat out beat Netscape 6 in the realm of CSS2 support (IE5 isn't even a contender here).
But you don't mention it at all. I don't understand... why mention how great IE5/Mac is repeatidely and how great Mozilla is going to be, and completely ignore Opera? Hello, its great *now*!
It also has far easier support for a user to over-ride lousy layouts on pages with their own preset colors, and a handy zoom function for making those small pages readable (where the document layout over-ride option doesn't do it). I mean really, half the complaints you make about browser problems don't exist in Opera, and yet you completely ignore it.
Help me out here, why are you ignoring them?
Re:"What an uniformed asshole." (Score:3)
His recommendation ranks right up there with all the other pompous shit that people pull in the name of visual control. Lots of popular web sites like to inform me that I don't have Flash (I do), or that they don't support my browser (they do). It's sheer ignorance.
There are two correct solutions to the problem, neither of which are to specify font sizes in pixels. The first is to use the intersection of HTML tags that are supported by the various browsers. The second is tocode to the standard and wait for the browsers to catch up. Either way, making assumptions about platforms and output devices is not the way to do things.
Suppose my output device is a printer. How big are Zeldman's 24 pixel H1s going to be then? About 0.04 inches. Unreadable garbage. Just deliver the content for fuck's sake.
Lost part of text? (Score:4)
Part of the answer to question 7 (about web extensions) seems to have been cutoff by question 8 ( about banners). Could somebody fix that?
Right now it says:
Color blindness? (Score:3)
How can anyone dislike a nice color like Teal (the Slashdot color), yet apparently really like flaming, burning orange?
Why do I have a feeling that one needs protective eyewear in order to enter his house?
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