Simon Willison's Weblog: jeffrey-zeldman

Quoting Jeffrey Zeldman

2010-01-24T13:40:19+00:00

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting. A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

— Jeffrey Zeldman

Tags: death, hosting, jeffrey-zeldman

In defense of web developers

2009-07-07T15:52:55+00:00

In defense of web developers

Zeldman: “The social benefit of rethinking markup sealed the deal. XHTML’s introduction in 2000, and its emphasis on rules of construction, gave web standards evangelists like me a platform on which to hook a program of semantic markup replacing the bloated and unsustainable tag soup of the day.”

Tags: html5, jeffrey-zeldman, markup, web-standards, xhtml

Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML WTF

2009-07-04T01:22:47+00:00

Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML WTF

Reading the comments, it’s scary how many people are totally ill-informed about HTML5 and XHTML5.

Tags: education, html5, jeffrey-zeldman, web-standards, xhtml, xhtml5

Quoting Jeffrey Zeldman

2007-11-20T23:44:37+00:00

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

— Jeffrey Zeldman

Tags: a-list-apart, design, jeffrey-zeldman, webdesign

XRAY web developer's suite

2007-07-30T17:11:19+00:00

XRAY web developer's suite

Smart new bookmarklet from westciv—kind of like Steve Chipman’s MODI but with the addition of the canvas element for box model visualisation.

Via Jeffrey Zeldman

Tags: bookmarklets, canvas, javascript, jeffrey-zeldman, steve-chipman, westciv, xray

Let there be web divisions

2007-07-05T01:34:52+00:00

Let there be web divisions

A call to arms from Jeffrey Zeldman: organisations need Web divisions that operate separately from Marketing and IT.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Zeldman on why drop down menus suck

2004-06-29T16:39:29+00:00

Zeldman on why drop down menus suck

Good for pointing people to.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Further more...

2003-06-16T18:11:50+00:00

By coincidence, Jeffrey Zeldman just posted something in a similar vein to my previous rant, looking at things from a different angle:

By its recent actions, Microsoft seems to believe that if consumers want the Internet, they will use the next version of Widows to access Microsoft-based web services and MSN content, and to download XBox patches. And some consumers will do just that. But consumers have a choice.

By its recent actions, Microsoft has also made dupes of its employees who contributed to web standards. In light of recent news, it appears the company tolerated these employees' activities because they pacified the developer community.

Yet regardless of Microsoft's intentions, those standards did make it into all recent browsers and the availability of browsers that commonly support CSS1, XHTML, some of CSS2, and the DOM is changing the way designers and developers create websites. And that will not stop. So long as we design with standards, we and the end-users on whose behalf we toil will continue to have a choice.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Flamin' CSS

2003-04-20T17:27:32+00:00

Dave Winer, in a follow up to his recent CSS problems:

I used to work reasonably well with designers until CSS came along. Now my writing is supposed to be a soldier in the fight for Web "standards." Help. My work has to look great in MSIE, and I can't wait for the other browsers to fix their bugs. So I'm going to use paragraphs and breaks and old unbuggy stuff like that where I need to.

Mark Pilgrim responds:

I used to work reasonably well with Dave Winer until the RSS validator came along. Now my feed is supposed to be a soldier in the fight for "validation" and "standards". Help. My syndicated feed has to look great in NetNewsWire (according to my site statistics, it has more than 4 times the market share of Radio), and I can’t wait for the other newsreaders to fix their bugs. So I’m going to skip required elements and use invalid XML whenever it suits me, and to hell with the validator, and to hell with these newfangled "standards".

Jeffrey Zeldman offers some solid arguments against tag soup:

Over the past two years, Mr Winer has repeatedly complained about CSS and structural, semantic markup, and has even asked what is wrong with tag soup. As one who sees the web as a vehicle for writing, Mr Winer should know instinctively what is wrong with tag soup. Tag soup bloats web pages, slowing their delivery for all users and especially penalizing dialup users. Tag soup corrupts data by yoking it to nonstandard formatting instructions. These formatting instructions work in some environments but fail in others. For instance, they get in the way when trying to deliver content to text-oriented devices with small view ports, such as Palm Pilots and web-enabled cell phones. Why should the users of these devices be forced to download 40K of HTML formatting instructions that will not work for them? And then have to download 40K more when they link to a new page? And 40 more on the next?

Those are the key posts. The resulting flame war can mostly be found here (along with trackbacks to pretty much every other bit of blog coverage).

Meanwhile, Sterling Hughes poses a valid point in favour of presentational markup in response to Sam Ruby:

Your site [code] still is signifigantly harder to read, at least for me. I'm constantly cross referencing - HTML to CSS, HTML to CSS, HTML to CSS, HTML to ... When you dissassociate style information, I contend that its really not about the humans editing the file anymore. Its about robots understanding the file. This point is made even clearer by XHTML 2.0, where they remove the style attribute.

This is certainly a problem with CSS layouts - their maintainability can suffer due to the separation of the presentation from the layout (itself the greatest advantage that CSS provides). Tools such as the ViewStyles, ancestors and ShowDivs bookmarklets certainly make this easier but to my knowledge no one has written a bookmarklet that shows the inherited styles for the currently selected element - at least not yet. Pixy's List Computed Styles comes close, but shows styles for every element in the document all in one big window.

So Dave dislikes CSS because support is buggy, while Sterling sees it as adding extra complexity. Buggy suport is pretty much a solved problem now, at least for most simple layouts - the CSS-Discuss Wiki is accumulating information on how to defeat bugs at a very decent rate and any problems not solved on there are certain to be understood by the friendly inhabitants of the CSS-Discuss mailing list. As for the extra complexity argument, laying out web sites with HTML has always been complicated - take a look at any site that uses nested tables to see what I mean.

In my experience, resistance to CSS seems to come mostly from people who have been creating table based layouts for years. This is unsurprsing - they are being told to throw out everything they have learnt and start with a completely clean slate. I think the real evidence that CSS is a less complex way of laying out pages comes from new developers; I recently taught my girlfriend to design pages (starting from no previous experience) and she took to CSS like a duck to water.

Tags: css, dave-winer, jeffrey-zeldman, mark-pilgrim

Zeldman and definition lists

2003-02-05T23:38:13+00:00

I'm really liking Jeffrey Zeldman's latest redesign. Aside from a pretty face, the markup holds some interesting ideas as well. For example, I've never seen a definition list used for a blogroll style list before:


<dl id="outside2" style="display:none;">
<dt>Relevant Externals:</dt>
<dd><a href="http://www.20things.org/" target="eljefe" 
  title="20 people make 20 things in 20 days.">20 things</a></dd>
<dd><a href="http://www.alistapart.com/stories/indexAccessibility.html" target="eljefe" 
  title="Accessibility articles and tutorials at A List Apart.">Access @ ALA</a></dd>
<dd><a href="http://www.gregstorey.com/airbag/" target="eljefe" 
  title="Greg Storey&#8217;s beautiful personal periodical.">Airbag</a></dd>
...

It makes sense in that "Relevant Externals" is a definition of the following list of defined terms. The official specification for definition lists is notoriously vague in any case:

Definition lists vary only slightly from other types of lists in that list items consist of two parts: a term and a description. The term is given by the DT element and is restricted to inline content. The description is given with a DD element that contains block-level content.

[...]

Another application of DL, for example, is for marking up dialogues, with each DT naming a speaker, and each DD containing his or her words.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Browser upgrade messages enter history

2003-01-05T23:41:35+00:00

There's been something of a backlash against "browser upgrade" messages recently, for a variety of reasons. Now Jeffrey Zeldman, the man who brought upgrade messages widespread attention in the first place, has admitted that he too is moving away from them. With 4.0 browsers almost a thing of the past and awareness of web standards much greater than it was a year ago it looks like they may have hit their retirement date. Incidentally, Jeffrey's post includes the following piece of standards compliance propoganda which, while old hat to most people, I feel is still worth a quote:

The cost of bandwidth-intensive, invalid markup, and of detection scripts that continually run afoul of their target, is too high. Such methods waste site owners’ money in a futile effort to keep up with ever-changing browser versions. More importantly, they hurt web users, forcing everyone to download bandwidth-busting heaps of inaccessible junk markup and proprietary code forks so that an ever-shrinking minority of old browser users can have the exact same experience as the majority. (Meanwhile, this same junk code locks out screen reader and wireless users, and often denies access to the physically impaired as well.)

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

At frigging last

2002-11-08T18:54:57+00:00

Jeffrey Zeldman:

The next issue of A List Apart will publish a technique allowing designers to embed Flash movies while adhering to W3C specs and eliminating code bloat. No, really. Watch this space.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Funky new use for CSS backgrounds

2002-11-06T00:58:33+00:00

Jeffrey Zeldman points to the newly redesigned v-2 Organisation site, which features a clever technique whereby a large background image is displayed "widescreen" style with different amounts of the photo visible depending on the resolution / width of your browser. Try doing that with standard tables ;) The (unaltered) colours in the photograph cleverly match the colours of the site itself.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

CSS roundup

2002-10-31T20:36:43+00:00

Jeffrey Zeldman has resolved his niggling CSS bugs, and posted the workarounds for all to see. What's amazing and unprecedented about CSS layout is that it's completely abstracted from the data it presents. he muses. Dorothea Salo points out that the publishing industry has been doing this for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, Todd Dominey has overhauled his CSS to get rid of the javascript browser detection and Mark Pilgrim and Scott Andrew have both posted funky Halloween CSS makeovers.

Tags: css, jeffrey-zeldman

Tweaking sites for readability

2002-10-24T15:10:21+00:00

Jeffrey Zeldman's new design continues to develop, but remains virtually unreadable on my monitor (without extensive tweaking of the settings). I'm not griping though as this was an ideal opportunity to play with Mozilla's DOM inspector. This handy tool allows you to load up a page and browser through the DOM of the page, tweaking as you go. More importantly, it lets you modify the CSS rules for each individual element. It took a matter of seconds to fire up the inspector, browse down to the CSS rules for the body element and change the colour setting to rgb(255, 255, 255) - not particularly pretty but a lot more readable on this monitor than the default black. Of course, a bookmarklet to do the same thing would be much more convenient...

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Wired Redesigns

2002-10-11T20:52:07+00:00

Wired have redesigned, and now boast one of the snazziest CSS layouts on the web. The redesign is explained in A Site for Your Eyes, and has already drawn commentary from Jeffrey Zeldman and Mark Pilgrim (with plenty more certain to come). I think the title of Mark's entry pretty much sums it up - this could well be the high profile redesign the web standards movement has been waiting for.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman, mark-pilgrim

Zeldman on Caesar's palace?

2002-09-12T23:38:07+00:00

Is this photo for real?

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Fixing IE6

2002-09-03T15:13:27+00:00

Jeffrey Zeldman on fixing A List Apart for IE6:

MSIE6 has trouble calculating the heights of block level elements. Eddie Traversa discovered the browser was caching the values it calculated on one page of ALA and incorrectly applying those values to other pages of the site.

Put simply, if the content area on page A was 200px high, and the same area on page B was 400px high, IE6 might display only the first 200px when it loaded page B. The initial value got stuck in the browser's cache. This is the reason that manually reloading (for instance, by hitting F11) "fixed" the bug on a page by page basis.

Jeffrey mentions a javascript fix for the problem which is now in use in ALA's global javascript file, and promises an article describing the fix in the near future.

Tags: a-list-apart, ie6, jeffrey-zeldman

Zeldman gems

2002-08-30T22:48:51+00:00

Two gems from Jeffrey Zeldman: Show, don’t sell and Table Layouts, Revisited. An extract from the former:

Take credit for what CSS has done. Don’t say: "Web standards did this." Do say: "We’ve set up a system that will automatically format the page whenever you update it." Let the client think you’re smart and give you more business.

In the latter, Jeffrey sings the praise of transitional layouts which use simplified table structures enhanced with CSS, thus providing a more practical aproach to dealing with commercial requirements and legacy browsers.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Zeldman played by a stand up comic

2002-08-16T02:04:17+00:00

Eric Meyer has confessed.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Thanks for the link

2002-08-14T19:29:52+00:00

Stuart has pointed out that this is the second time Jeffrey Zeldman (who is actually Eric Meyer) has spelt my name wrong :)

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Zeldman interview

2002-08-13T21:40:07+00:00

Jeffrey Zeldman: "99 percent of Web sites are obsolete". An excellent interview covering web standards and the new techniques they encourage.

Tags: jeffrey-zeldman

Zeldman on accessibility

2002-07-08T22:04:52+00:00

Jeffry Zeldman: Many web practitioners still believe that accessiblity is an ugly, no-frills affair. Not true. An excellent piece on accessibility issues.

Tags: accessibility, jeffrey-zeldman