Sir WThRemix-a-Lot

WThRemixRadu Darvas is the grand prize winner of the WThRemix contest, in which contestants were asked to redesign the W3C home page using valid, table-free XHTML and CSS. Among the five winners, Darvas’s design clearly deserves the grand prize. Unfortunately, the overall quality of the contest entries is a bit disappointing, with many devoid of personality or attention to typographic detail, and many more employing questionable design tricks. This is the danger of CSS, I suppose: its toolbox of layout tricks is plentiful enough to override good taste; in a way, the standard’s novelty factor echoes the early days of Photoshop, when everything was marbleized, drop-shadowed and/or embossed.

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The Fix Is In

Six.5.02Most of the major work on Six.5 is done. Late last night I finished the template for each individual post (the page that results when you click on the the post’s title or the “This post continued…” link). This was one of the main motivations behind Six.5, as the new template allows for a lot more design flexibility than its predecessor.

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Imperfect Visio

VisioAfter our client meeting in Northern Virginia yesterday, I am now charged with, among other things, the creation of a series of click-through wireframes. The idea is to model the page ‘flow’ in order to provide a rudimentary demonstration of the experience we’ll be building. This is definitely information architecture territory, and while I flatter myself that I am qualified to participate in IA activities, I certainly do not participate in them often enough. What’s more, I gotta say that I’m not all that hot on using Visio.

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Tab Dance

TabsApple has just released the second public beta of its upstart Safari Web browser with the prominent addition of tabbed browsing. This is a user interface feature that’s old hat to users of Netscape 7, Camino, Opera etc. It’s relatively new to me, having only recently emerged from my seclusion inside of the Internet Explorer tank, and I’m already a huge fan. There’s a camp that dislikes tabs but I can’t even imagine why. First, tab usage is entirely optional and second, it’s so much more efficient and organized than toggling between multiple windows.

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Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen

At Behavior, we tend to have this same discussion over and over again every few months: “We need some good designers. How come there are so few good designers out there?” It drives me bats. There were record numbers of design graduates at the end of the last decade, and in theory when the Internet bubble burst, they all flooded the job market, looking for work. Though we have a small stable of talented, dependable visual designers, we’ve found it difficult to expand their numbers.

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I-E-ecchh

Internet ExplorerDuring the Internet boom, I counted myself among the many legions who switched over entirely from Netscape — then at version 4.something and a disaster of a Web browser — to Microsoft Internet Explorer. With its monstrous and seemingly unstoppable marketshare, IE became a de facto standard, and it just struck me as being so much easier to design Web pages for IE than to strive for cross-browser compatibility. Now, I see the error of my ways.

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See CSS Run

CSS: The Definitive GuideIt wouldn’t take much to get me to admit that the way I’ve used Cascading Style Sheets for Subtraction.com Six.0 is a bit, er, ad hoc. My expertise with CSS is minimal, but with this redesign I made a concerted effort to look to the future and to try and learn as much as I can. My somewhat hazy goal was to follow the principles of transitional layouts and to wean myself off my dependence on nested tables. Though I’m nowhere near mastering CSS, I’m steadily climbing the learning curve, thanks to two books by noted expert Eric A. Meyer.

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Feeding on RSS

NetNewsWireIf like me, you’re new to the concept of RSS, here is the lowdown: ‘Really Simple Syndication’ is an XML dialect that allows Web content to be easily re-purposed. Just about anybody, including me, can publish content in RSS format and have it effortlessly re-used by any number of RSS-compatible means… like, for instance, the terrific NetNewsWire, a news reader for Mac OS X that “can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news.”

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