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Nine dead giveaways you just don’t get webdesign
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You put valid XHTML/valid CSS buttons in the footer of your website. This makes you feel like like a standarista when you ride your bike back home. Validation is not the goal, it’s there to help you.
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Your Photoshop mockups are > 968px wide. You wonder why clients always complain about horizontal scrollbars when you send them design mockups.
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The font size of your website’s body text is 10px. Bonus points if it’s not selectable (e.g. most flash websites) and in a pixel font.
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You still use
@importto link your stylesheets. -
Text-decoration: none;is the first thing you define when you style your links (for body text). Preferably your body text is almost the same color as your link colors. -
You refuse to define :hover styles for menus and links. What’s interaction anyway?
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You strongly resent the inline styles in this post, as I should have defined a class to my ordered list. Even though this is the only time an ordered list is styled with this amount of list spacing.
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The font you use in your editor is not monospaced, and you use spaces for indenting. Bonus points if you indent your HTML manually.
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The editors of Smashing Magazine are your gods.
I stopped doing that a long time ago. Plus I have a car.
October 12th, 2007 at 7:23 ∞I don’t own a copy of Photoshop.
Pixel fonts rule!
Never done that.
Yuk.
Does anyone else get a kind of zooming sound inside their head when they start typing “:hover”?
You should keep expanding your stylesheet. I always try to look ahead and guess what kind of things I will need. But if I would keep expanding the stylesheet of my blog I would finally know what I need the next time. And I’m typing this in an ordered list to see if you were expecting that.
Does “Convert Tabs to Spaces” count?
Hey now! I like to read long lists of stuff I’ve seen ten times over. But they do have some good stuff from time to time.
Can you eplain why you think using @import is wrong, Wolfr?
October 12th, 2007 at 12:26 ∞Because you shouldn’t be supporting Netscape Navigator 4 and IE3 anymore. Nobody uses these browsers.
October 12th, 2007 at 1:17 ∞I only failed #2 (my current clients are using big screens). I should probably get out of the habit though. BTW, really nice website.
October 12th, 2007 at 2:41 ∞I’d slightly alter #1…
You put valid XHTML/valid CSS buttons in the footer of your website even if you’re primary audience is not other web developers.
I see nothing wrong with attempting a little outreach to spread the message but very few non-webmasters are going to click on those buttons and none of those few will even understand the result of clicking on the button.
October 12th, 2007 at 4:22 ∞I prefer using border-bottom instead of text-decoration to underline my links. It allows me to control the distance between the text and the line and even specify a different color that is a bit more subtle. Both which provide less strain on the eye.
For a good example, see jontangerine.com. So yes, it’s one of the first things I do when defining the visual properties of links. Although I get where you are going to: links should be clearly distinguishable, preferably/possibly offering a certain visual consistency across the entire website and even better across the entire web (in this case, the underline).
October 12th, 2007 at 5:51 ∞@wolf: I see what you mean now, but I don’t agree ;)
You’d be surprised to know how many government workers still use NS 4.7 on a daily basis. Until late 2005, its bundled mail and calendar application (’Netscpae Mail’ and ‘Netscape Calendar’) where the default ‘office apps’ for over 13.000 (!) Flemish government workers. Clicking on a link in an e-mail message inside Netscape Calendar *always* opens web pages in Netscape Navigator (even if IE is set as the default browser). Now they’ve switched to Outlook 2003, but thousands of computers still have the Netscape Suite from 1999 installed… and out of a habit, lots of users still use NS to navigate the web, in many cases becaue their bookmarks are all stored in NS and they don’t know how to transfer them to IE or another browser. This happens to be an example I know of, but i’m sure there are lots of similar situations. Just remember that millions of people don’t have access rights on their work pc to install a new or better browser and that some IT department are extremely conservative about rolling out new software.
By *not* using @import, what you actually say is: “I’d rather leave my Netscape visitors with a completetely messed up (and in some case even unreadable lay-out because of positioning and box model issues etc.) than offer them a nice and clean unstyled page (which is what you get when using @import). Well, i prefer the latter ;)
October 12th, 2007 at 5:53 ∞@Adam: Agree on spreading the message, but with the current development of HTML/CSS, web standards are becoming more of a joke everyday. Which doesn’t mean a lot (a lot!) of the message spread by the web standards community is very right.
@Lode: nice styling on the Jon Tan website. As long as it’s a solid border I can live with using border-bottom. Better readable too. Dotted and dashed is not done.
October 12th, 2007 at 7:14 ∞Great list Wolf. Glad you’ve put me in my place (really), I’ve got a bit more research and work to do it looks like.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:03 ∞Related to #1, you say validation is not the goal. I totally agree. Validation tells us nothing about the most important part of your markup: semantics. Of course making sure that your markup is well-formed (validates) is only one step in the process of constructing good semantics.
October 13th, 2007 at 1:45 ∞Theres a good few clues in your list that you really don’t get webdesign, as for:
“You strongly resent the inline styles in this post, as I should have defined a class to my ordered list. Even though this is the only time an ordered list is styled with this amount of list spacing.”
that may be true now, but what when you think, “you know what, i’ll do my new list just like the old one i did” ….
as for smashing magazine, thats a great resource, i certainly aint gonna click your rss button.
October 13th, 2007 at 8:07 ∞You don’t get the point. Read this: http://www2.jeffcroft.com/blog/2007/aug/09/myth-content-and-presentation-separation/ - come back.
October 13th, 2007 at 8:09 ∞The only one I’m guilty of is #1. I have them on my premier site, which I show to other developers. I also use them for quick validation when testing new code. I’d never put them on a clients site, that’s for sure.
I’m not much of a designer anyway. I’m much better at developing code than designing interfaces. However, I do like to make sure everything is easy to read, well organized, flexible and interactive. I may be a bit of a show off, but I’m not retarded.
October 14th, 2007 at 7:02 ∞XD
I don’t do photoshop mockups, Does this mean I am doing something wrong?
Why oh Why do you youngsters always know better that the folks who taught you? The pioneers in this industry did not use front page or dreamweaver. As a matter of interest flash is not design, it’s artistic onanism.
October 14th, 2007 at 7:15 ∞@Guy: Make mockups in HTML, even on paper if you want to. I prefer to show clients static images of their website in an actual browser window to mimic what the site is going to look like.
October 14th, 2007 at 8:55 ∞We look at many aspects but knock together a quick template with working links to show the client. its actually quite easy if you have your own CMS.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:48 ∞I don’t see what’s wrong with #1. If putting that stupid link/button on a website makes people realize that there is something like a standard, than that’s a good thing.
October 14th, 2007 at 11:01 ∞Whether you put it there or not, is just a matter of taste and has nothing to do with getting or not getting webdesign imho.
@Guy: we do structure before layout, because it’s easier and less time-consuming to change the structure if there’s no layout yet.
@Dieter: No, because this link takes you to a validation page (with errors, most likely), not to webstandards.org. Writing a good article on web standards would help way more to get people to realize there is something like ‘web standards’.
October 14th, 2007 at 11:47 ∞But it is not a mutual exclusive thing Wolf. It is all about context. Surely there will be people who just put those links as a kind of prestige, to make them look like ‘cool’.
October 14th, 2007 at 12:10 ∞But there will also be people who do put those links on their pages to stimulate awareness and who _also_ write daily about web standards, semantics, usability and what not. It is fairly short sighted to winnow out people based on such a simple act. You are putting out a bold statement while you could just get the message across.
@Lode: The real situation is not as black/white as I state in my posts, but if we all talk shades of grey, the discussion is going to be very, very dull (and will probably lead nowhere).
Btw, any news on Bitcrumbs Blog ;)?
@Roel: seems your message got caught up in the spam. No idea why.
My opinion: by supporting whatever you can support, you are not moving forward and you are giving the wrong message. The IT department of the government is at fault here.
The whole argument of “yes, but those people can’t install new software” is wrong on so many levels. If there is a problem, and there is a need for a fix, it will get fixed.
If your browser can’t read <link> you’re missing out on half the internet. The other half will look stupid. It’s not the webdesigners’ fault at all. Support what you can is not true in the slightest way - to move forward one must push away old standards.
People were shocked when designers started to design for 1024* too. Actually, only web designers were shocked, the rest of the world didn’t care and moved on.
October 14th, 2007 at 4:00 ∞