In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind. This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards [...]
Archives for 2007
Duplicate Work is a Bug
“You’ll sometimes hear people joke that good programmers are ‘lazy’, and what this means is simply that good programmers tend to see duplicated work as a bug, and try to fix it.” – James Bennett, discussing CSS frameworks
Good Web Designers are like Good Newspaper Designers
“The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.” – Jeffrey Zeldman, [...]
A Few Dumb Questions
“I’d rather answer a few dumb questions than put up with a few dumb assumptions.” – Aaron Cannon, in reply to a question about whether he tires of people asking him about his blindness
Post-It by Number
For the Pop Art 10-year anniversary party, the creative team laid out a 20-foot-wide grid of three-inch squares on the wall of the conference room. Then they bought a large supply of multi-colored Post-It notes, and labeled each square in the grid with a number. At the party, they asked party-goers to match the colored [...]
41 Useful CSS Links
I was clearing out my bookmarks recently, and noticed that I had a pretty large collection of web development and CSS-related bookmarks that I never refer to any more, but might be useful to people who are just getting started with CSS. So with that in mind, here’s a collection of links, and I hope [...]
Web Design for Sara Ryan
In January, I got an email from Sara Ryan, asking if I would be interested in designing a website for her: Hi Scott — I found your site while searching for Portland web developers who use WordPress, and I really like the look and feel, as well as your focus on CSS and web standards. [...]
Skinning Community Server 2007
We recently upgraded the Pop Art Blog to Community Server 2007, and I was assigned to upgrade the templates. Dave produced a wonderful comp, and when I read about CS2007′s new Chameleon Theme Engine, I was pretty excited. The actual experience of working with the templates turned into a bit of a nightmare, however.
Urn Will Totally Get This
Annie: What in the world is a WYSIWYG editor? Scott: Oh, it stands for “What You See Is What You Get.” It means one of those editors where when you make text bold or increase the font size, you can see the changes on-screen, like Microsoft Word. Annie: Oh… I had no idea what you [...]
Now Witness the Power of this Fully Armed and Operational Regular Expression
For a recent project, I found myself having to convert 60+ product detail pages from the old table-based format to the new XML-based format. I was doing this on my own, and I didn’t relish the thought of manually editing hundreds of tables of product details. For example, here’s an excerpt from one of the [...]
WYSIWYG Editors are the Bane of My Existance
I had to make a slight tweak to a page on a site with a content-management system today. After spending a few minutes unraveling the code, I found out that a simple list of three links was using the following markup, which has clearly been screwed up by the WYSIWYG editor on the site. <p> [...]
Selling Web Standards is Hard
I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that the extra money we charged them to upgrade their site to web standards will make [...]
Citations, Emphasis and Italics
Wanna get a headache? Go type “html book titles italic em” into Google and read for about 15 minutes. What you’re looking at is an intense debate over the best way to mark up a book title using HTML. I’ll save you some time and tell you that after several hours, my conclusion is that [...]
What Scotty from Star Trek Can Teach Us About Managing Expectations
Kirk: “How long to re-fit?” Scotty: “Eight weeks. But you don’t have eight weeks, so I’ll do it for you in two.” Kirk: “Do you always multiply your repair estimates by a factor of four?” Scotty: “How else to maintain my reputation as a miracle worker?” Kirk: “Your reputation is safe with me.” – From [...]
An Event Apart Seattle 2007
Last year, I attended An Event Apart 2006 in Seattle. It was a great event, although I remember it being really rushed, because they seven sessions packed into one day. So when I heard that they were coming back to Seattle, and had changed the format to two days, I signed up right away. I’m [...]
Visit Cascadia
The guys I work with at Pop Art just launched a site they’ve been working on for quite awhile now, and I’m really excited to finally be able to talk about it. The site is VisitCascadia.com, and it’s a promotional site for the new Freightliner truck, the Cascadia, framed as a site for a city [...]
How Web Standards Made a Better Site for LP
What started as a simple project with LP to redesign their top-level landing pages quickly grew to encompass their entire site. This brought with it some surprising logistical difficulties, which the Pop Art team overcame through clever use of web standards. The end result is a new look applied across the entire site, with the [...]
First Annual Web Design Survey
“People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession.” A List Apart is hosting the first annual Web Design Survey in an effort to learn more about the people in the web design profession – presumably so we can have more [...]
CSS Naked Day ’07
It’s that time of year again when standards-conscious web designers shed their stylesheets and let their sites run around, exposing their raw markup to the world to promote web standards. The idea is that a standards-based site will be marked up semantically enough that even without the stylesheets, it’s still usable, if not pretty. I [...]
Moving from LiveJournal to WordPress
I’m working on a new site for a local author, and one of the things she wanted was to move her blog from LiveJournal to WordPress. I did a bit of research, and found out that there are a few complications. LiveJournal’s export tool will only export a single month of entries at a time. [...]
Getting Things Done: One Paragraph Review
David Allen, the “personal productivity guru” featured on the cover, brings us his guide to “the art of stress-free productivity.” It’s a quick read, and after thinking it over for a few days, I’ve come to the conclusion that people reading this book will fall into one of two camps. First, there will be the [...]