The earliest websites were minimal in the extreme, but without the style and flair to make a virtue of their simplicity. 37signals and Kottke pioneered the combination of simplicity with deft design sense. Cardigan made it art.

Although it is never popular, never the dominant trend, rarely wins design awards, and almost never earns acclaim from designers, design stripped down to its essentials is always a good idea, and especially on the web, where every byte counts. We salute the old and new practitioners of minimalist web design, and solicit your thoughts on pioneers or present practitioners who combine a minimalist aesthetic with significant design chops.

• 37signals home page, 27 November 1999
• 37signals detail page (first signal), 27 November 1999
• Kottke.org, home of fine hypertext products, 9 March 2000
• Kottke.org, home of fine hypertext products today
• Drudge Report, 10 December 1997
• Drudge Retort
• cardigan.com by Dean Allen (abandoned 2001)
• Wilson Miner
• Subtraction.com by Khoi Vinh
• WordPress Neutica theme designed by Allan Cole (Hat tip: Oliver Lorton)

[tags]design, webdesign, minimalism, history, web design history[/tags]

Filed under: Design, links, style, Web Design, Web Design History, Websites

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It’s outrageous that the CSS standard created in 1996 is not properly supported in Outlook 2010. Let’s do something about it.

Hundreds of millions use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the web, and Microsoft Outlook to send and receive email. As everyone reading this knows, the good news is that in IE8, Microsoft has released a browser that supports web standards at a high level. The shockingly bad news is that Microsoft is still using the Word rendering engine to display HTML email in Outlook 2010.

What does this mean for web designers, developers, and users? In the words of the “Let’s Fix It” project created by the Email Standards Project, Campaign Monitor, and Newism, it means exactly this:

[F]or the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

It’s difficult to believe that in 2009, after diligently improving standards support in IE7 and now IE8, Microsoft would force email designers to use nonsemantic table layout techniques that fractured the web, squandered bandwidth, and made a joke of accessibility back in the 1990s.

Accounting for stupidity

For a company that claims to believe in innovation and standards, and has spent five years redeeming itself in the web standards community, the decision to use the non-standards-compliant, decades-old Word rendering engine in the mail program that accompanies its shiny standards-compliant browser makes no sense from any angle. It’s not good for users, not good for business, not good for designers. It’s not logical, not on-brand, and the very opposite of a PR win.

Rumor has it that Microsoft chose the Word rendering engine because its Outlook division “couldn’t afford” to pay its browser division for IE8. And by “couldn’t afford” I don’t mean Microsoft has no money; I mean someone at this fabulously wealthy corporation must have neglected to budget for an internal cost. Big companies love these fictions where one part of the company “pays” another, and accountants love this stuff as well, for reasons that make Jesus cry out anew.

But if the rumor’s right, and if the Outlook division couldn’t afford to license the IE8 rendering engine, there are two very simple solutions: use Webkit or Gecko. They’re both free, and they both kick ass.

Why it matters

You may hope that this bone-headed decision will push millions of people into the warm embrace of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but it probably won’t. Most people, especially most working people, don’t have a choice about their operating system or browser. Ditto their corporate email platform.

Likewise, most web designers, whether in-house, agency, or freelance, are perpetually called upon to create HTML emails for opt-in customers. As Outlook’s Word rendering engine doesn’t support the most basic CSS layout tools such as float, designers cannot use our hard-won standards-based layout tools in the creation of these mails—unless they and their employers are willing to send broken messages to tens millions of Outlook users. No employer, of course, would sanction such a strategy. And this is precisely how self-serving decisions by Microsoft profoundly retard the adoption of standards on the web. Even when one Microsoft division has embraced standards, actions by another division ensure that millions of customers will have substandard experiences and hundreds of thousands of developers still won’t get the message that our medium has standards which can be used today.

So it’s up to us, the community, to let Microsoft know how we feel.

Participate in the Outlook’s Broken project. All it takes is a tweet.

[tags]browsers, bugs, IE8, outlook, microsoft, iranelection[/tags]

Filed under: Browsers, Compatibility, CSS, Design, Marketing, Markup, Microsoft, software, spec, Standards, State of the Web, style, The Profession, Tools, W3C, Web Standards, Working, XHTML

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In Issue No. 286 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites, Patrick Lynch explains why beauty matters in design, and Mark Birbeck introduces us to RDFa.

• Introduction to RDFa: Learn how semantic features normally confined to the head of an HTML document can be used to add semantic richness to the elements of the body. Part One of a two-part primer.
• Visual Decision Making: If it takes only 50 milliseconds for people to form an aesthetic opinion of your site’s credibility and trustworthiness, are designers who create visually compelling sites wasting time and treasure on indulgences?

Filed under: Design

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WaSP InterAct is a “living, open web standards curriculum.” Put together by an amazing group of dedicated educators and industry experts, the curriculum is designed to teach students the skills of the web professional—and ease the burden of colleges and universities, struggling to develop timely and appropriate curricula for our fast-moving profession.

Schools that teach web design struggle to keep pace with our industry, and those just starting their curricula often set off in the wrong direction because the breadth and depth of our medium can be daunting. The WaSP InterAct curriculum project seeks to ease the challenges schools around the world face as they prepare their students for careers on the Web. … Its courses are divided into six learning tracks that provide students with a well rounded foundation in the many facets of the web design craft.

The group offers its resources to all who need them (to reuse adapt), and it seeks your content and ideas.

[tags]design, data, webdesign, webstandards, education, curriculum, WaSP, webstandards.org[/tags]

Filed under: Design, Web Design, Web Standards, Working

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For the third edition of Designing With Web Standards, I’ve brought in a co-author: the brilliant and talented Mr Ethan Marcotte.

Mr Marcotte is a web designer/developer who “works for Airbag Industries as a Senior Designer, swears profusely on Twitter, and is getting married to an incredible lady.” He is also a technical editor and contributing author to A List Apart, and the co-author of several fine books about the intersection between great code and fine design. Then there’s the fact that I dig him. I dig the hell out of him. I love him like a younger, sweeter, funnier brother.

That’s important because I don’t add a co-author to any book, let alone this book, lightly. In asking Ethan to help me bring the awesome to this substantially revised and rewritten edition, I chose not only on the basis of expertise and writing ability, but also on sheer karma.

In his new role, Ethan joins a SuperFriends™ line-up including technical editor Aaron Gustafson (Twitter), another honey of a guy, and truly one of the smartest, most innovative, and most knowledgeable voices in web standards, and editor Erin Kissane (Twitter), whose mastery of the subtlest details of voice consistency alone makes her the finest editor I have ever been blessed to work with. Behind it all, there’s Michael Nolan (Twitter), New Riders’ sagely seasoned acquisitions editor and a designer and author himself, who first took a chance on me as an author back in nineteen ninety humph.

Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition is coming this year to a bookstore near you. I thank my brilliant crew for making it possible. Onward!

[tags]EthanMarcotte, beep, unstoppablerobotninja, airbag, alistapart, CSS, design, webstandards, webdesign, designingwithwebstandards, DWWS, 3rdedition, DWWS3e, writer, writers, authors[/tags]

Filed under: CSS, Design, development, DWWS, Education, Publications, Publishing, Respect, Web Design, Web Standards, Zeldman

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The zeldman.com redesign is up. You’re soaking in it. It’s old school. It’s brand heritage, baby. It’s retro 90s web. It’s so retro it’s nowtro. Because old is the new new.

Mainly, the redesign is content focused. After so many years as a web designer, and after creative directing so many influential projects, I naturally considered doing a wide, three-column, ultra-modern design—something cool, detached, polished, and glowing with rich media and fancy-pants sliding-drawer JavaScript effects. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things. In the right circumstances, those things can rock hard. But this site is mainly about my writing. So I crafted a simple look that encourages reading and hearkens back to this site’s early years.

Read more about it here, here, there, and elsewhere. (Don’t freak out; these old posts are now in the new layout, adding a layer of surrealism to the experience, since you’re looking at a blog post in the finished new look that links to and talks about cruddy early versions of that same look.)

If orange hurts you, there’s a style switcher in the footer that will remember your preference for an off-white background. You’re welcome.

WordPress implementation by Noel Jackson.

Rotation script by Mark Huot.

Thanks, fellas! And thanks to all readers who critiqued the public beta.

[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, redesign, redesigns, webdesign, design[/tags]

Filed under: Web Design, Web Standards, wordpress, work, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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Michael Lopp shares lessons on how to separate office politics from truth when leading a team, and Lyle Mullican explains how the key to faster, more empowering user experience may begin in better database design, in Issue No. 285 of A List Apart, for people who make websites.

[tags]A List Apart, alistapart, database, design, team, building, leading, michael lopp, lyle mullican, webdesign, webdevelopment, development[/tags]

Filed under: A List Apart, Design

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The html5 gallery is a showcase of sites using HTML 5 markup.

html5 gallery has two primary aims, the first is to showcase sites that use html5 for markup, so that we can see how people have interpret[t]ed the specification and how they’ve implemented it. This leads me on to the secondary aim which is to help people learn about html5 and how it should be used and how to implement it.

I’m hoping that a side effect of this is that browser developers will see how many people are implementing html5 and add more support for it in their rendering engines so that we don’t have to add display:block; to elements where not required and we don’t have to rely on javscript to create elements.

You can follow @htmlgallery to get updates when new sites are added to the gallery.

Richard Clark, a front end designer based in Manchester, UK, created and maintains the site. You can follow Richard on Twitter.

Filed under: HTML5, links

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A “Not Safe for Work” Tag has been proposed for HTML 5:

One of the most common descriptive notes people have to write using text when they post links or images to blogs, comments or anywhere in HTML is to say “this link is not safe for work” or simply “NSFW”. By adding the <NSFW> tag, this could be made much simpler and standardized. Browsers could then have an option to automatically hide all <NSFW> content. A tag is preferred to an attribute since it could then also be used around content and not just links.

Examples:
<nsfw><a href=”http://www.example.com”>Pics here!</a></nsfw>
<nsfw><img src=”badkitten.jpg”></nsfw>

(Via Bruce Lawson)

Drew McLellan of The Web Standards Project thinks it’s a nice idea that won’t work:

@brucel we looked into #nsfw in microformats. It’s an unworkable minefield. #

it’s used when linking to something that you might want to save until you get home. e.g. http://ampleboobies.info (NSFW) #

So a browser could conceivably be configured not to follow links or display content tagged nsfw. Sounds a good idea, but unworkable. #

The use of tags (rather than CSS and JavaScript) to hide or show content is an intriguing and controversial aspect of HTML 5. It’s intriguing because using a standard tag—instead of writing custom CSS and JavaScript that someone else may someday have to maintain—potentially simplifies web development and maintenance, bringing advanced techniques of content presentation to more sites for less money. It’s controversial because it sticks presentation and behavior back in markup, after we all just spent a decade separating site structure and semantics from behavior and presentation.

We’re going to be following these developments and trying to make buzzword-free sense of them for you.

[tags]standards, webstandards, HTML, HTML5, tags, NSFW, W3C[/tags]

Filed under: Design, HTML, HTML5, Standards, State of the Web, W3C, Web Design, Web Standards

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Robert Black was right. OS X 10.5.7 adversely affects the internal heat management of some iMacs (and apparently also some MacBooks), causing the machines to overheat. Overheating, in turn, leads to such problems as freezes during iCal sync; freezes during iTunes sync; and the inability of attached hard drives to complete a backup.

I confirmed this by installing smcFanControl and watching my Mac get hotter and hotter as it tried to complete a SuperDuper backup. Disk Utility confirmed nothing was wrong with the attached drive. Swapping cables proved a faulty cable was not to blame for previous failed backups. Maddeningly, the backup got within 4GB of completion before locking up due to the overheating of my iMac.

Not every iMac or MacBook is affected. It probably varies by factory run and by model. (My MacBook Pro, for instance, is fine.) Third-party stuff and Migration vs. Tabula Rasa System Install seems to have no bearing on whether or not your Mac will choke on the update.

Since even running smcFanControl at settings recommended by Robert Black and others doesn’t cool the iMac enough to finish a backup or verify the quality of the attached drives, it may not make sense to replace my external hard drives (as new drives will likely also fail as the iMac overheats during backup).

With smcFanControl in place, I can use my iMacs but not back them up.

Apple needs to release an update that fixes the hardware problems this one created.

(And someone else needs to install it before I do.)

[tags]OSX10.5.7, bugs, Apple, Macintosh, update[/tags]

Filed under: Apple, bugs

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