My timestamp is wrapped in an H3 because it is of lesser importance than my article title, which merits an H2. It would be wrong to give the timestamp greater structural weight than the article title merely because it precedes it. It would also be wrong to change the design to force the H3 below the H2 merely to please people who like to see grammar school outline style expressed in order. It is okay to have small type above big type. In newspapers and in advertising layout there are many names for this, including “eyebrow” (the small text, often italic that precedes the headline).

I could easily introduce hacks to my CSS that would move the sidebar where it belongs in IE6, but this is a site for web designers and developers, and in particular for standardistas, very few of whom are using IE6 as their daily browser (except perhaps when forced to in an office situation). A standardista forced to use IE6 at work, who uses Safari 4, IE8, or Firefox 3+ at home, will understand and accept that zeldman.com isn’t overly concerned with niceties of layout in a nearly ten-year-old browser whose bugs vis-a-vis web standards are legion and legendary. The One Ring was Isildur’s Bane, and IE6 is our bane (as Netscape 4 once was). While in most commercial sites, I and all of us still probably need to create a separate IE6 style sheet, or hack up our single style sheet with mind-dead “rules” that compensate for most of IE6′s tragicomic deficiencies, we don’t have to do that on *every* site, and I choose not to do it on this one, where I don’t have to.

I set my font sizes in px because every modern browser now supports PAGE ZOOM rather than TEXT ZOOM and px enable greater accuracy when you create both vertical and horizontal grids, as I use on this site, deceptively simple though it may appear to your eyes.

And Jeffery may have made a big song and dance about web standards, but even after all these years his own website still only validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

My name is spelled Jeffrey.

What’s wrong with XHTML 1.0 Transitional?

And Jeffery may have made a big song and dance about web standards, but even after all these years his own website still only validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

The previous website did a good job of masking the designer’s complete lack of understanding of typography and spacing, but this design makes those issues especially stand out, among others.

This is a mediocre design at best which many amateurs may praise Zeldman for, but if you stood this up against any true professional web designer’s work then everyone would see clearly what a poor effort this is.

My issue is of legibility.
The bold orange links fight for dominance of attention over the rest of the content. I feel these links now take precedence over the content. So my question is in doing this are you now stating that external links are more important than the content? What is the purpose of having such a strong contrast of marking a link so strongly?

It is your site, you’ve clearly thought about it, so I’m asking.

After reading all of the criticisms, I fiddled around with a user stylesheet in Firefox to address a couple of personal nits. Here’s what I found.

Re the H2 leading:
I changed the line height to 1.2em and 1.em, and after looking at it that way for a few moments, it still looked hinky (for lack of a better term) and now I’m getting used to the existing leading. Shorter headlines is a good fix. Nuff said.

Re Georgia, Times and Blockquotes:
As to the body text, I’m not seeing a problem on WindowsXP and FF.

What I am seeing is that you haven’t specified a Windows font face for blockquotes. So, at 1680×1050 I’m finding the blockquote text a wee bit small. I looked at your site on the Mac, and the blockquote font is significantly more readable at 14px than Times New Roman is on FF. I tried subbing out for Georgia, which is more readable but there’s less visual separation between blockquote and body copy. I tried Lucida Console, and that looked pretty cool, but the addition of the extra typeface busied up the site and I wasn’t sold on it. Still…

Re tag links:
The tag link text appears smaller on Safari Mac. They sort of assault the eyeballs on FF Win. Might also be a Win font substitution issue? As per Hudson’s comment, but I don’t think they need to be boxed. That they are upper cased sans-serif and large is probably where the issue lies, the effect is better when scaled down.

That was the end of an hour’s worth of fiddling. I’ve deleted the Firefox user stylesheet. I didn’t improve much, but I learned some. Too bad some of the more vitriolic critics didn’t try this tack.

Last words from me:

Re Orange
Pardon your history… but your own archives are missing an inclusion of content in the legacy orange design, the one with the table-based masthead and the orange background. I think it’d give some of the nay sayers a bit of historical context. Or have I overlooked something?

And, William of Orange, clever! First comment that made me laugh.

As an aside: the old orange design featured vertically repeating dashed lines, three of them, about 70 or 80 pixels off the left viewport? Do I win a prize for remembering details?

Post title permalinks
Another Zeldman tradition. The Daily Report (get it, daily?) has been organized around dates for as long as I remember (about a decade) and since the advent of WordPress on this site the URLs are date based, so the date is the logical permalink. It’s funny to me that critics are saying “it looks too much like a WordPress theme, and can you please make the titles permalinks?” Seriously.