Suddenly it seems like respected web designers everywhere are starting to catch on to what I’ve been saying for a couple years now: established standards and best practices are great, but they are simply a means to an end, and we should always challenge them in cases where it seems like a different means to the same end might be more effective. “Perfect” can be, at times, the enemy of “good”.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything in Martin’s article, but I’m glad to see other big names beginning to jump on the pragmatic, but still standards-oriented, approach. Visit site »
August 18th, 2008–August 19th, 2008 in San Francisco, CA
nGen Works is unquestionably one of the best bunch of guys I’ve met in this industry, and they’re looking for a great production person to join their team. If you’re a great HTML/CSS/JS person, you definitely want to check out this job. nGen is based in Jacksonville, FL, but the job description says, “relocation optional.” Visit site »
Safari is probably the most reliable browser out there when it comes to rendering things as a standards-aware developer would expect, but there are those rare times when you need to target it specifically with some unique rules. For those cases, this article will point you in the right direction. Visit site »
The wonderful Paul Boag from Headscape interviewed me for the latest episode of Boagworld, almost certainly the best web design podcast on the planet. We talk about my “controversial” views ...
Oh man, this looks sweet. I’ll say it again: the WebKit team is totally doing the right thing here by continuing to innovate with these new features. Dear WebKit: web designers everywhere thank you! Visit site »
EveryBlock takes over A List Apart for an issue, with Wilson Miner’s awesome piece on using web standards to create data visualizations like bar charts and sparklines, and Paul Smith showing you how to roll your own custom mapping interface. Great issue. Visit site »
I’m not entirely convinced that Django’s recent popularity has much to do with web standards, nor am I that convinced that Django is “winning” in our community over Rails or other modern frameworks — but, it’s true that Django allows those of us who value web standards to do our thing quite easily, and it’s good to hear that people are noticing that. Visit site »
May 22nd, 2008–May 23rd, 2008 in San Francisco, CA
“We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.”
So there you have it. This should make a lot of standards-oriented developers happy, as it makes out jobs easier. I think this is the right move by Microsoft, although I never could quite figure out very firmly where I stood on the whole topic. At the very least, it prove MS is listening to the developers, and that can only be a good thing. Visit site »
Your markup validator, whether it’s the one on the W3C site or one built into your favorite coding tool, is a debugging tool. It should be used as such ...
For anyone trying to make sense out of the whole IE8 X-UA-Compatible nonsense, James Bennet's explanation is almost certainly the most well-thought out and easy-to-understand one you're going to find. I now have an opinion on this matter. I'm with James: X-No-Thanks.
But even though I have an opinion, it’s not a very strong one. Why? Because, quite frankly, I’m just not that interested. If X-UA-Compatible lands in IE8, I'll suck it up and spend 20 minutes putting the tag in all my sites, toss a few more curse words Microsoft's way, and move the fuck on. Ultimately, for those of us doing standards-based work, this isn't that big a deal. If we're doing things right, and this actually happens, it means we have to put one measly meta tag in our code form now on. Big f’ing deal.
Here’s hoping it doesn’t ever happen, though. Visit site »
Today, I finally got around to reading the brouhaha over IE 8 and it’s version-targeting system. The last blog entry I read was Jeffrey Zeldman’s In defense of ...
Building on his post at Wired’s blog earlier this week, Scott Gilbertson now has a full article on the Wired front page, and again quotes me. I know it seems silly, but this is really cool to me. I’ve been reading Wired since its inception in the early 90s, so to be quoted on their website is pretty neat. And, they didn’t even get me using an F-bomb, this time. :) Visit site »
Wow, very nice. This is impressive. It also makes Opera look very, very silly. So now that all the majors can claim reasonable standard compliancy, can we please get those browser wars started again? :)
Congrats, IE8 team! Visit site »
A life long goal of mine is to be mentioned in Wired magazine. Today, I’m in their blog. That’s pretty close, right? It even calls me a “prominent developer.” But most importantly, it quotes me (accurately, even!), dropping an F-bomb. Classy, Jeff. Real classy.
Thanks, Wired. :) Visit site »
Stuart responded to the same Alex Russell piece I did, only less positively. Stuart makes good counter-arguments to many of Alex’s points. Alex then shows up in the comments and the two politely debate back and forth — it’s a really great discussion. The conclusion? Stuart seems to be coming around to many of Alex’s ideas.
It’s tough to talk openly in this community about things that aren’t “compliant.” The second you mention trying something outside of the standards world, you get clubbed with the giant Internet stick, even if you’re a standards advocate 95% of the time. I’m glad people are starting to talk openly about what’s *really important — innovation and moving forward — rather than just about how we can all fall in line and be compliant all the damn time. Visit site »
My former co-worker James ahres his insights on some of the stuff we’ve been discussing here at JeffCroft.com. Gotta say, I sort of hate how James always manages to come off as such a level-headed dude in his blog posts. If only you guys could see what he’s like in real life…
Just teasing, James. :)
Kind of. Visit site »
Chris has a nice, toughtful response to my blog post that didn’t fit in my 3000 character limit (note: my limit is going up once I switch over to the new version of my CMS!). I generally agree with most of what Chris has to say, and I think he may have misunderstand some of my thoughts: I am in no way suggesting we abandon the existing standards. Rather, I’m suggesting that browser makers should be encouraged to innovate, using the unobtrusive -renderingengine syntax, alongside the existing standards. Visit site »
Alex Russell, proprietor of the Dojo JavaScript library, has written a provocative new piece that is so incredibly spot-on, it’s scary. It’s an absolute must-read for any web ...
Andy says that Opera’s latest filing against Microsoft is evidence that the CSS Working Group (which contains mostly representatives of the various browser manufacturers) must be disbanded and a new strategy put into place — one which includes more representation from designers and developers.
I’ve written about this before, so obviously, I generally agree with the general principles. However, I’m unsure what motivation browser makers would have to implement standards if they were less involved with creating them. And, quite frankly, I’ve pretty much give up on the idea of the W3C as a relevant body in our industry. The W3 basically feels to me like the 55 year old store manager who has been working at your local WalMart for 30 years. He’s slow, old, tired, obsessed with policy and procedure, and resistant to change — people just kind of let him think he’s in charge while the rest of the company moves on around him.
Bottom line: I generally agree with Andy, but I see no reason to believe a change will ever happen. Visit site »
Kudos to Molly for being willing to ask Bill Gates tough questions straight to his face. Personally, I’m less interested in what MS is doing with regards to standards support in IE8 and more interested in what they’re doing to improve adoption rate of their newer browsers (like IE7 now, and IE8 when it’s available). Visit site »
According to Subvert Marketing, Blue Flavor is one of the top 10 interactive agencies in the world. That’s awesome, but I think the list might be more aptly titled “The world’s top 10 interactive agencies who focus on web standards-aware development.” Everyone on the list is a great choice, but there are few that probably should be there, as well — nclud and Behavior both come to mind. Visit site »
The battle for web standards in browsers has largely been won — browsers are much better than even, and even those manufacturers that still have room to improve appear to be making sincere efforts to do so. But, the same can not be said for e-mail clients. Some (like Mail.app and Thunderbird) mooch off existing rendering engines (WebKit and Gecko, respectively), and therefore do a great job of rendering HTML and CSS e-mail. Others do a ridiculously poor job.
Love it or hate it, HTML e-mail is here to stay, and I’m glad to see someone setting out to solve the rendering problem in e-mail clients much the same way the web standards movement solved the rendering problem in browsers. The client tests alone are worth bookmarking this site for. Visit site »
Jon’s post is really good and worth reading, but I’m actually linking to Joe Clark’s comment on it, in which he states, “Jeff is getting craftier at restating his ‘Real code isn’t all that important’ ideology.” I’m not quite sure what “real code” means, but I found it amusing to hear Joe put words in my mouth.
Since I don’t know what he means by “real code,” I can’t speak to whether or not he’s accurately paraphrasing my thoughts. The only code I can call myself any kind of expert on is HTML and CSS, and in the case of those, my only “ideology” is to write clean code that is as semantic as possible (in the case of HTML) and as valid as possible within the constraints of a given project (budget, timeframe, etc.). I can only presume this is what Joe’s referring to. Visit site »
Jim Ray (a helluva guy, for the record), explains why the new MSNBC.com pages don’t have a DOCTYPE leading off their source. What you’ll learn from reading it is that the people currently at MSNBC.com care deeply about standards and doing things the right way, but are handcuffed by some legacy code and tools. They’re working on it, and they’ll get their eventually.
As you know if you read this site regularly, one of my biggest pet peeves is people getting attacked for less-than-perfect HTML when its obvious they’re trying. One look at MSNBC.com’s source will show a marked improvement from the past, and a clear attempt at doing the best they possibly can. The fact that anyone would direct their standardista wrath and folks who are trying their best when there are still people not trying at all really irritates me. Visit site »
Patrick really hits the nail on the head in this piece originally written for the UK’s .net magazine. He touches on a lot of the ideas I’ve been spouting off about around here lately — in particular, the fact that sometimes less-than-perfect is “good enough,” and in fact that sometimes having your designer focus on the big picture is a lot more valuable than having your designer spend his/her time making sure ampersands are encoded and every links has a title attribute. A few choice quotes:
As an accessibilista and web standards evangelist, I admit that this prospect seems anathema to the ideology I’ve been advocating for years. However, the pragmatist in me is willing to make certain small concessions when it comes to the purity and finesse of markup and styling if these are outweighed by increased production capacity and faster turnaround times, which ultimately aid in keeping a large content-driven site accurate and up-to-date.
…web authors should see content management systems as opportunities. Just as CSS frameworks and JavaScript libraries, they are simply tools that, when judiciously applied, can greatly enhance productivity by automating repetitive and mundane tasks. The creative act of crafting appropriate templates still requires technical expertise.
…any tool which can enable us to work smarter, not harder, should be seen in a positive light.
Bravo, Patrick. One of my favorite articles in quite a little while See also the super-sexy PDF version. Visit site »
If you read this blog regularly, you’ll remember that I had some thoughts on The New Layers of Web Development in a recent entry. Basically, I talked about how ...
Blue Flavor Principal Brian Fling explains why the “One Web” concept, while sound from a technology perspective, simply doesn’t make much sense from the perspective of user experience. Visit site »