Category: Standards

Web standards for design and communication.

Categories
37signals Design industry Standards war, peace, and justice Zeldman

Crash Boom Bop

The path the plane took
Interactive graphic shows path taken by single-engine plane registered to New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle that crashed into a residential high-rise on East 72nd Street, yesterday, killing Lidle and his flight instructor. It’s amazing how disasters lend themselves to the creation of cool infographics.
Subtraction + Zeldman
Khoi Vinh (AIGA/New York board of directors, design director for nytimes.com) should interview himself, but instead he interviews me on the cusp of my AIGA New York talk next week. As previewed in the interview, my talk will focus on how to build relationships that let you sell clients good work.
Web 2.0 Validator
Hilarious. (The score for 37signals.com is 7 out of 52.)
Meyerweb: W3C Change
The third (and most radical) of Eric Meyer’s proposals to save the W3C from irrelevance: “Transform the W3C from a member-funded organization to a financially independent entity.”
Fireside Chat
Cederholm, Sims, Santa Maria, and Storey tell 37signals what they think of the state of web design. (Things I did not know before: no boxes, grids, or columns were used in web design until web standards came along to ruin everything.)
Daring Fireball: Qualcomm ends Eudora development
I’ll stop using Eudora when they pry it from my cold, dead, one-button-mouse-clutching fingers. Oops, maybe sooner than that.
UsedWigs Radio Podcast 18
He could have been a radio star: Greg Hoy of Happy Cog Philadelphia is interviewed.
0sil8
Jason Kottke’s first website. Take that, Ze Frank!
Class Critique
Jason Santa Maria takes it on the chin.

[tags]design, AIGA, webstandards, happycog, jasons[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Design Standards

ALA 224: Krista, Q tags & trench wisdom

In Issue 224 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, we welcome to our staff someone we’ve long admired.

Krista Stevens brought a strong voice and vision to Digital Web as that magazine’s editor-in-chief. In addition to her editorial and managerial gifts, Krista has a fab eye for fresh writing talent. It thrills us to welcome her as A List Apart‘s acquisitions editor.

We also have two fine new articles:

12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards

by Ben Henick

Slick tips and life lessons for the standards-challenged—which, on any given day, includes practically all of us. Semantic markup and CSS layout bring wondrous benefits, but at a cost of frayed nerves and bitten fingernails. Read this article and get fewer headaches. Author Henick last wrote for us in Issue 100. Here’s hoping we hear more from him, sooner.

Long Live the Q Tag

by Stacey Cordoni

“The Q tag has been around for nearly nine years, ever since the first version of HTML 4.0. Its purpose is to handle short, inline quotations that don’t require paragraph breaks.” For instance, the text I just quoted belongs inside Q tags. Trouble is, in all these long nine years, Internet Explorer for Windows (it’s awesome!) has never supported the Q tag. New ALA author Stacey Cordoni crafts a workaround.

Edited by Erin Kissane. Illustrations by Kevin Cornell.

[tags]alistapart, design, webdesign, semantics, qtag, css, webstandards[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility Design development Publishing Standards

ALA 223: tricks, guides, and giggles

A guide for the first-timer. A new trick for the size-conscious designer. And a bit of a giggle. Three pleasures await you in triple-thick Issue 223 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

The ALA Primer: A Guide for New Readers

by Erin Lynch

New to A List Apart? Welcome! ALA’s own Erin Lynch has picked out a selection of articles that you may want to start with.

Text-Resize Detection

by Lawrence Carvalho and Christian Heilmann

It’s still hard to create page layouts that don’t break if the user increases the type size by more than a few settings. Chris Heilmann and Lawrence Carvalho serve up a way to detect your visitor’s font size settings using JavaScript.

A Standardista’s Alphabet

by Jack Pickard

“A is for Aaron, who fell down the stairs. K is for Kevin, menaced by bears.” No wait, those are just the notes from our last staff meeting. Jack Pickard offers a lighter look at the world of web standards.

[tags]design, a list apart, alistapart, textsize[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart Design events Standards

An Event Apart Austin

Though Seattle has sold out, we’re pleased to announce our next Event Apart. Come join Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, your humble narrator and a mystery guest for a Texas-sized day of design and code in Austin, TX.

Monday, November 6th, 2006
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown
409 Colorado St.
Austin, TX 78701

Alamo Drafthouse

We love movies, and the Alamo Drafthouse might just be the best place in the world to see them. It’s also a great place for an event. The seats are comfy, the sightlines clear, the screen sizeable, and the food wonderful. All this and free Wi-Fi, too!

Register early to save $50!

Registration is open now, and you can save $50 off the cost of attending An Event Apart Austin if you register by October 6th, 2006. There are a limited number of seats, so don’t wait too long to claim your stake!

[tags]design, events, austin, texas, webdesign, aneventapart, an event apart[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart Design development events Standards

Get your kicks on Pier 66

Sorry, An Event Apart Seattle is all sold out!

There are still a few seats available for An Event Apart Seattle, featuring Kelly Goto, Erin Kissane, Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, and Zeldman. Grab them (the seats, not the speakers) before the price goes up! Our early bird discount ends this Friday, August 18th. (Schedule | Map | Registration)

[tags]design, events, seattle, aneventapart, an event apart[/tags]

Categories
Blogs and Blogging Design development film links Standards

Thursday links

Designspotter.com
A web-based platform (public group blog) for design publication, protection, and publicity. Upload an image of your work and a linked description to feature your product at no cost.
Oliver Stone, Terror Tourist
Fred Gates pimp-slaps Stone’s 9/11 blockbuster (movie review).
Google Strict vs. Google Deprecated
Does Google’s crap markup really save bytes? Philipp Lenssen finds out.
GraphicDesignBar:Design Forum
Fine new design blog, rich in inspiring links. (Yes, that’s one of Douglas Bowman’s standard Blogger templates.)
P22 News: Lanston Type Co. Summer 2006 releases
Goudy, Bodoni, and Broadway, oh my! P22 announces the latest installment of remastered fonts from the historic Lanston Type Company.
We are the Web: Fighting for Net Neutrality and Internet Freedom
Net neutrality and internet freedom are being disbanded by greedy corporate swine and the lobbyist-fattened US lawmakers who are their lackeys. In case you didn’t know.
Natural language hCard
Jeremy Keith on adding hcard semantics to ordinary body copy—naturally. (I’ve done it here.)
David Hughes Illustration
Kind to your eyes.
AsylumNYC
AsylumNYC presents all non-US artists with the opportunity to exhibit and live in New York City, providing a solo show at a recognized New York institution and the legal aid necessary to obtain an artists visa in the United States.
Weekly inspiration – 14 July
Thought-provoking UX/IA blog posts noted.
New York Times Librarian Awards
“The New York Times Librarian Awards were created to support and recognize public librarians, who do so much to nurture a better-informed society.” Nominate your favorite librarian from anywhere in the U.S.
Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent
Concise, uniquely conceived blog entries, elegantly written and cleverly embedded in photos which function as parallel blog entries. The creator is a thoughtful and multitalented web developer, portrait photographer, and book author.

[tags]librarian, awards, typography, design, graphic design, web design, user experience, UX, information architecture, IA, microformats, hcard, net neutrality, webstandards, web standards, bandwidth, Google, Oliver Stone, art, illustration, immigration, links[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart cities Design industry people Standards

An Event Apart Seattle

Join Kelly Goto, Erin Kissane, Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer and me for a jam-packed day of design and code on glorious Puget Sound.

The Time and Place

Monday 18 September 2006, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Bell Harbor International Conference Center
2211 Alaskan Way, Pier 66, Seattle, WA 98121 (Map)

Beautifully situated at Pier 66 on the downtown Seattle waterfront, Bell Harbor provides stunning views of the city and across Elliott Bay to Mt Rainier, plus easy walking proximity to the shops and restaurants of world-famous Pike Street Market.

The Schedule

Doors open at 8:00 am and the fun starts at 9:00:

9:00 am Hardcore CSS [Eric Meyer]
An in-depth exploration of what makes CSS work, how it works the way it does, and how you can make it work harder for you.
10:00 am These Aren’t the Droids You’re Looking For [Zeldman]
Selling design, accessibility, and web standards to tough clients, stubborn bosses, and unconvinced colleagues.
11:00 am BREAK!
11:15 Solving (Re)Design Problems [Jason Santa Maria]
Visually repositioning a beloved brand (namely, A List Apart). Design as problem solving. Knowing which problems to solve.
12:00 pm “One True Layout” [Eric Meyer]
Incredible stroke of genius or gross hack to be shunned? Eric analyzes this new “miracle” CSS layout technique and examines the pros and cons, both immediately and into the future.
1:00 pm Lunch
2:00 pm Sponsor Giveaways
Free software and services courtesy of Adobe, AIGA, Media Temple, Mozilla, and New Riders.
2:10 pm Textism (Writing the User Interface) [Zeldman]
Better design, better branding, and better usability through word choice. Editing for designers.
3:00 pm Designing for Lifestyle [Kelly Goto]
As design migrates from the web to mobile devices, our approach must also shift. Learn how companies are using ethnographic-based research to design smarter interfaces.
4:00 pm BREAK!
4:10 pm CRITIQUES [Kelly Goto, Erin Kissane, Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Zeldman]
A rip-snortin’ romp through the design, code, and content of sites created by some of the smartest people in the world — namely, the attendees of An Event Apart Seattle

The Afterglow

Join us after the event for a Happy Hour and a Half featuring free cocktails, sponsored by Blue Flavor.

6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
The Alibi Room
85 Pike St Ste 410
Seattle, WA 98101-2001
(206) 623-3180

[tags]aneventapart, an event apart, seattle[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Design development industry Standards Tools

An angry fix

Some of the best minds working in web standards have been quietly or loudly abandoning the W3C. Björn Hörmann is the latest. His reasons for leaving the W3C QA Group make compelling reading (hat tip: Terje Bless). I believe in W3C standards, particularly the ones you and I use every day, but I worry about the direction in which the W3C is headed.

Beholden to its corporate paymasters who alone can afford membership, the W3C seems increasingly detached from ordinary designers and developers. Truth be told, we and our practical concerns never drove the organization. But after ordinary designers and developers spent nearly a decade selling web standards to browser makers and developing best practices around accessibility and semantics, one hoped the W3C might realize that there was value in occasionally consulting its user base.

Alas, the organization appears unconcerned with our needs and uninterested in tapping our experience and insights. It remains a closed, a one-way system. Like old-fashioned pre-cable TV advertising. Not like the web.

To be fair, the W3C solicits community feedback before finalizing its recommendations. But asking people to comment on something that is nearly finished is not the same as finding out what they need and soliciting their collaboration from the start.

We require coherent specifications based on our and our users’ actual needs. Upcoming accessibility and markup specifications fail on both counts. We require validation tools that work and are kept up to date. Instead, tools are still broken years after problems are reported.

Two things could happen. Either the W3C will make a course correction, or the standards-based design community will look elsewhere.

[tags]web standards, w3c, wcag, xhtml, web design, microformats[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Design development Publishing Standards work

ALA 219: Automatic layouts and goodbye to <embed>

Two swell authors we’ve never had the pleasure of publishing before bring creative solutions to the 219th issue of A List Apart:

Automatic Magazine Layout

by Harvey Kane

Even if you (or your client) has talented designers on staff, they’ll rarely have time to resize and reposition the images that bring life to a web layout. You need photos laid out automatically, but you’d rather your page not look like it was designed by orangutans. Harvey Kane’s clever script will make your life easier (and your site more attractive).

Bye Bye Embed

by Elizabeth Castro

In the age of Google Video and YouTube, can you embed QuickTime video reliably across browsers without using the invalid EMBED element? Building on the pioneering work of Drew McLellan, Ian Hickson, and Lachlan Hunt, best-selling author Elizabeth Castro sets out to embed without EMBED.

About these authors

Mr Kane is a prolific writer and developer. Ms Castro is a superb author whose HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide has sold more than a million copies. The Sixth Edition(!) comes out next month.

[tags]a list apart, alistapart, web design, webdesign[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility An Event Apart cities Design development events Standards Zeldman

An Event Apart NYC Schedule

A detailed schedule of An Event Apart NYC has been posted at aneventapart.com and reproduced below for your convenience. Join Tantek Çelik, Ze Frank, Aaron Gustafson, Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman for two days of design and code in the heart of New York City:

9am – 5pm, Monday 10 July & Tuesday 11 July
Scandinavia House
Victor Borge Hall — Level A
58 Park Avenue, New York City, NY 10016
Map | Hotel info

Victor Borge Hall is located on Level A, one floor below ground. Enter at the front door on Park Avenue and take the elevator located at the rear of the entrance hall, across from the ground-floor Gift Shop. Wheelchair-friendly restrooms are located on Level B, accessible via the elevator.

Seating is lecture-style, in a comfortable and exquisitely designed theater space, and doors open at 8:00 am. There is no Wi-Fi at this venue, but we will provide downloadable files the night before the show for those who wish to follow along on their laptops.

Schedule

An Event Apart NYC runs from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm. We have a lot to cover, so the event will start promptly. Arrive early to get a good seat! Doors open at 8:00 am; for best results, plan to show up between 8:00 am and 8:30 am. Here is what you can expect over the two days of this conference:

DAY I – DESIGN DAY

9:00 am Welcome and Housekeeping [Zeldman]
9:05 am Textism (Writing User Experience) [Zeldman]
Better design and better usability through word choice. Editing for designers.
10:05 am BREAK!
10:15 am Solving (Re)Design Problems [Jason Santa Maria]
Visually repositioning a beloved brand (namely, A List Apart). Design as problem solving. Knowing which problems to solve.
11:00 am Bringing A List Apart Together [Eric Meyer]
How someone like Eric Meyer takes a design and turns it into a living, breathing web page.
12:00 pm Lunch
1:00 pm Sponsor Giveaways
Adobe, Media Temple, New Riders and AIGA Press will hand out valuable software, services, and books for free.
1:15 pm A Day in the Life of a Design Director [Khoi Vinh]
From sun-up until the stroke of midnight, Khoi Vinh will take us through a typical day inside the NYTimes.com design group.
2:15 pm What’s the Story? [Zeldman]
Finding brand narratives that set your site apart from others like it. Seizing inspiration from limited budgets.
2:50 pm BREAK!
3:00 pm Web 0.2 [Ze Frank]
A personal, down-in-the-trenches view of how the technology revolution impacts the way we communicate with a mass audience.
4:00 pm DESIGN CRITIQUES [Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Ze Frank, Zeldman]
A rip-snortin’ romp through the design and architecture of sites created by some of the smartest people in the world (namely, the attendees of An Event Apart NYC).

DAY II – CODE DAY

9:00 am Welcome and Housekeeping [Eric Meyer]
9:10 am Hard-Core CSS [Eric Meyer]
An in-depth exploration of what makes CSS work, how it works the way it does, and how you can make it work harder for you.
10:10 am BREAK!
(You’ll need it)
10:30 am Microformats [Tantek Çelik]
What are microformats, and how can they transform the web? Tantek Çelik, co-founder of the microformats movement, tells us what’s already happening and what comes next.
11:30 am “One True Layout” overview [Eric Meyer]
Incredible stroke of genius or gross hack to be shunned? Eric analyzes this new CSS layout technique and examines the pros and cons, both immediately and into the future.
12:30 pm Lunch
1:30 pm Sponsor Giveaways
1:45 pm So you want to be a DOM Star [Aaron Gustafson]
What does it take to be a great front-end developer in today’s marketplace? Aaron Gustafson lays it all on the line.
2:40 pm BREAK!
3:00 pm Web Standards Second Edition [Zeldman]
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
4:00 pm Code critiques [Eric Meyer, Aaron Gustafson, Tantek Çelik]
A fast-paced, rough-and-tumble review of markup, style, and scripting on a select group of sites created and submitted by attendees.

Food

Catering is by Restaurant Aquavit, the country’s premier Scandinavian restaurant, and includes vegetarian choices.

Lunch

  • July 10: Gravlax Club, Grilled Scandinavian Shrimp, and Roasted Mushroom sandwiches. Salad and potato salad.
  • July 11: Smoked Salmon, Spice Roasted Pork Loin, and Roasted Mushroom sandwiches. Salad and pasta salad.

All Day Long

Freshly Brewed Coffee, Decaffeinated Coffee, Selection of Teas, Assorted Soft Drinks and Sparkling Water.

Afternoon Pick-Me Up

  • July 10: Assorted Cookies
  • July 11: Basket of Fruit

Details

It’s a non-smoking event. Sorry, smokers! Still photography is permitted, but audio and video recording are forbidden, except by our official videographer, Mister Ian Corey. Sorry, recordists and videographers! As always, please be considerate when taking pictures. And speaking of pictures…

Flickr Group

We’ve established a Flickr group for those of you who want to share your photos with the world: flickr.com/groups/aeanyc2006.

Disclaimer

This schedule is subject to change. We’ll do our best to make the experience live up to what we’ve mentioned here, but cannot guarantee a perfect 1:1 correspondence. We thank you in advance for understanding any changes we may be forced to make due to events, people, and other stuff beyond our control.

New York 2006 news

An Event Apart RSS feed

Subscribe and keep track of all the comings and goings of An Event Apart.

[tags]an event apart, aneventapart, design, code, conference, web design, webdesign[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility Design development Publishing Standards

ALA 218: Beauty, behavior, and power

In a triple issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Prettier Accessible Forms

by Nick Rigby

Forms are a pain. Either you can make them pretty, make them accessible, or go a little crazy trying to achieve both. Nick Rigby offers a happy solution.

Behavioral Separation

by Jeremy Keith

Breaking up is hard to do. But in web design, separation can be a good thing. As Jeremy Keith explains, structure, presentation, and behavior all deserve their own space.

How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team

by Shane Diffily

Just how many people does it take to properly manage a website? It depends on the website. Author Shane Diffilly offers some suggestions on determining your site’s manpower needs.

[tags]a list apart, alistapart, web design, webdesign[/tags]

Categories
Design Publishing Standards work writing Zeldman

DWWS 2e Cover Preview

Today, with a couple of minor corrections not shown in the following sneak preview, we approved front and back cover art (PDF, 161 KB) for Designing With Web Standards, 2nd edition. And with that, the last bit o’ the book flew off to the press. Somewhere a bell bonged and an angel got his wings.

You may notice that the second edition’s cover is green, and may recall that the cover of the first edition was orange. Boy, was it ever orange. Boy, is the second edition ever green. Peachpit, editor Erin and I discussed all kinds of possible cover art makeovers, but in the end I decided to change only the color.

Actually in the beginning I decided to change only the color. Then I pretended to keep an open mind while alternatives were discussed—my favorite being the Dorian Gray notion that my photo would age while the rest of the cover stayed the same.

Writing this second edition showed me that when it comes to web standards, some things have changed and others haven’t.

Things change, things stay the same

Since I wrote the first edition, the community of standards-aware designers has mushroomed. Better best practices have emerged, replacing the second-best practices with which we launched the revolution. More designers, developers, and content people preach and practice accessibility, and more clients request it. You find semantic markup, unobtrusive scripting, and CSS layout where you never expected to find them, and increasingly you find them coupled with good design, good usability, and even (eek!) good writing.

Without much hoopla and with even less press, web standards are powering findability and the “Web 2.0” applications that have made the web hot again for investors and shallow journalists.

All this is new and most of it is good, yet too many sites are still inaccessible, and too many clients and bosses (not to mention too many designers), if they know about standards and accessibility at all, still have it dead wrong. It is for them, even more than for you, that I wrote this book.

Today someone asked how she could persuade a colleague to include accessibility and standards compliance in the requirements for a major site redesign. I can’t meet with every hostile boss and nay-sayer on the planet, gently persuading each of them to see the light. But I can talk to them through the quiet pages of DWWS 2e, if you would like me to.

The pitch

Save 37% off the cover price when you pre-order Designing With Web Standards, 2nd edition at Amazon. Please note that Amazon’s listing currently shows the wrong cover art, the wrong table of contents, and the wrong excerpts. Not to worry. It’s the right book (and Amazon will correct the error soon).

[tags]zeldman, dwws2e, webstandards, web standards, newriders, peachpit, designing with web standards[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart cities Design events industry Standards

An Event Apart Seattle

It’s de-lightful, it’s de-lovely, it’s the city on Puget Sound. Join Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, and Jeffrey Zeldman on Monday 18 September 2006 at Bell Harbor International Conference Center for An Event Apart Seattle, a concentrated, creative learning session that could change the way you approach web design. Save $50 when you register by August 18th, 2006.

Categories
Accessibility An Event Apart cities Design development events industry Redesigns Standards Tools work writing Zeldman

Wrapping Chicago

An Event Apart Chicago has wrapped. It felt like the best one yet. Everything clicked.

There were as many designers as coders in attendance, as many Chicagoans as out-of-towners, as many agency people and freelancers as in-house folks, and nearly as many women as men. They engaged at “good morning” and stayed involved all day, asking shrewdly penetrating questions and sharing their own insights and experiences. Energy flowed not only between the floor and the seats but also from one seat to another. It felt like community.

This was the third time out for Eric, Jason, and me. Our talks were sharper and shorter — looser and more relaxed, yet also more focused than before. The rhythm was better. The balance between technical and aesthetic subjects, how much time was alloted to each, the way one theme flowed into another — the music of the day — felt tighter and truer than at events past.

Thanks to our sponsors at Adobe, AIGA, New Riders, and Media Temple, we were able to give away thousands of dollars worth of software, books, and services. (We’ll be doing the same at An Event Apart NYC next month.)

Guest speaker Jim Coudal‘s leisurely stories were like little grenades of inspiration. He tossed them out casually; moments later, they detonated.

The day formally ended with lively critiques of sites submitted by attendees. We tried this once before, at An Event Apart Philadelphia, with mixed results. This time it felt like it really worked. The day informally ended at Timothy O’Toole’s pub, with a mixer sponsored by Jewelboxing.

Time, and the blog posts of those who attended, will tell if the event was as good for you as it was for us. Sincere thanks to all who attended. Thanks also to Dawson, John Gruber, Amy Redell, Michael Nolan, and Orrin Fink.

And a reminder: the Early Bird Rate for An Event Apart NYC ends June 9th. That’s a week from today! On June 10th, the price will increase by $100. So if you’re thinking of attending An Event Apart NYC — two days of design and code — please register soon.

Categories
An Event Apart cities events Standards

In Chicago

Here we are in Chicago, city magnificent, blessed by architects, lake and river, where in less than twelve hours we’ll present the third Event Apart. I pray all who tread Chicago’s streets look up each day and feel how lucky they are to inhabit this Rome, this Paris of the American heartland.