Jeffrey Zeldman’s presentation on Designing With Web Standards has been posted to the web. I’m in the process of reading his book with the same name and find it very inspiring, which is an odd (yet great!) thing to say about a book on xhtml and css design. He lays out very clearly why standards are important, not just from a technological point of view but more so on the costs savings, greater efficiency and increases accessibility that can be achieved by adhering to standards. View the presentation and buy the book!
Category Archives: Design
Paying the Standards Piper
Tanya Rabourn (aka Pixelcharmer) posted an entry about dealing with a short-term CSS design decision made to accommodate Netscape 4 back in the day. There really was no way around that kind of a hack back then but everyone will be cleaning up after it for a long time to come.
JJG's Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams
Jesse James Garrett has posted an article laying out what he views as the nine major competencies for a web team: The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams.
This seems like an accurate model to me and maps pretty well to my own experience building a web team. If you are deficient in any one of the areas your overall effort will suffer quite a bit.
(Article spotted via James Robertson.)
Good questions about IE for Mac, AOL, MS
Jeffrey Zeldman asks some very good questions about the impact of no new IE for the Mac OS and how that relates to the recent AOL deal with MS.
My hope is that eventually the open source efforts at browser development will benefit from this but, as Jeffrey points out, the AOL/MS deal is a powerful jujitsu move on support for Mozilla (which is funded via AOL currently).
Web designers have to track this kind of stuff so they are aware of what browsers they will need to code for in the future. Anything that looks like it won’t lead to greater standards adoption is a bad thing.
PNH Developer Toolbar v0.51
This is an awesome plugin tool for web designers and programmers who are running mozilla or firebird browsers:
Currently Active Features
* Links to most W3C Specifications
* Automated submission to many validation tools
* Hide & show style sheets
* Apply your own external style sheet
* Highlight many HTML elements
* Resize Window to specific dimensions for testing
* Highlight form information
* View page cookies
CSS Rockets
This is worth checking out if you work with cascading style sheets: Simon Willison: CSS ain’t Rocket Science. Lots of good tips and ideas.
Tabs with CSS
Joshua Kaufman – CSS Tabs. How to create tabbed navigation with CSS.
I really need to make a CSS category.
UI Evaluation Perl Script
Web-Based User Interface Evaluation with Questionnaires
Nifty perl script for collecting usability feedback via standard, research-based, questionaires. (Found via pixelcharmer.)
Horizontal CSS Menu
CSS Workshop: Horizontal Menu.
If everything comes in three’s, I should have another CSS link soon.
CSS Column Design Tool
Update: Here is the main page for this site that provides lots of possible CSS layouts that work reasonably well in Netscape 4.x browsers (and very well in modern browsers).
CSS Column Design Tool. This page allows you to format a mulit-column CSS layout via a web form. Get it set how you want and then strip out the source code for your own templates. Great tool.
(Spotted at the Shifted Librarian.)
C. David Gammel, CAE 