I REMOVED Adobe CS5 from my studio Mac after it took on water damage during tropical storm Irene. Just as I was going to replace the machine, the water damage seemed to go away. (It actually never did go away, and as I write this it’s pretty bad, but for a week it seemed okay so I didn’t order a replacement.) As I need Photoshop this morning to work on a website, and as I’m still a registered CS5 owner, I logged into Adobe.com to download a “Trial” version of Photoshop. For all the good it did me, I could have eaten my own head.

Clicking “Download Photoshop” put an “Install Adobe Download Assistant” app on my desktop instead of downloading Photoshop. To download Photoshop from the web, you can’t just download Photoshop from the web. You have to download an installer that installs a downloader. There’s no benefit to the user for jumping through this extra hoop, but I guess Adobe Corporate wanted to show off its AIR-based software.

To download trial versions of Creative Suite software, you need to install the Adobe Download Assistant. After installation, the Adobe Download Assistant will start your product download automatically,

the website says. This is a lie.

Once installed, the downloader asks me to sign in again. Which is only logical. After all, between the time I clicked “download Photoshop” as a signed-in user and now, I might have been knocked unconscious by Photoshop pirates. Without a redundant double sign-in, the pirates would win.

So I type in my login and password again—same as I just did on the website to download this meshugah downloader installer in the first place—and guess what? Adobe says my login and password don’t match.

The login and password I used to download the installer downloader are unacceptable to the downloader. If you’re following this gibberish, God bless. If not, Adobe is telling me that the login and password I just used to install the downloader are no good.

Like a pimp pretending to help a runaway teen, a link in the unhelpful downloader now asks, “Having trouble signing in?” There being nothing else to do, I click the link, which takes me to a “Reset your password” panel. Only I can’t reset my password in the “Reset your password” panel; I’ll only be able to reset my password on a custom web page, whose address I will only learn once I receive an email from Adobe sending me a custom link. Excitingly, that “Reset your password” page (the one that will actually allow me to reset my password) will be generated on the fly via Adobe’s famous and ultra-reliable ColdFusion software.

I’ve now lost 30 minutes of work time but Adobe is not done with me. Oh, no. This is where the fun begins.

I spend long minutes reflexively checking my email, like a junkie scanning the corner in search of his busted dealer. The custom link email finally arrives, but the link never works. (It’s the cream of the jest!) Here is a screenshot of Adobe’s Chinese Japanese website, powered by ColdFusion, which is unable to generate a “Reset your password” page, allowing me to reset my password and use the AIR-based downloader software to download the software I already own.

Mission: not accomplished. Total time wasted: 45 minutes (not counting the writing of this blog post, which I do in the faint hope that Adobe will improve its customer experience). I still have no working copy of Photoshop and it’s clear I won’t get one today. The installer disks are gone from my office because I’m moving to a new studio soon and have been packing important pieces like installation disks ahead of time. (After all, I had reasoned, Adobe lets you download software from its website, so why keep disks around?)

To be fair, Hurricane Irene was not Adobe’s fault, and lots of people suffered much worse than a water-damaged iMac. Nor is water damage to my Mac Adobe’s fault. My decision to remove CS5 from the Mac was based on fear that if the Mac died and I hadn’t removed CS5, I would not be able to install it on the replacement machine I intended to purchase, as Adobe licensing (and the software itself) requires you to uninstall from Machine A before installing on Machine B. Adobe CS5 costs more than the computer I intended to buy, so it seemed prudent to remove it from the damaged machine, but of course I regret that decision now, because Adobe’s website won’t let me update my member information, and its downloader won’t let me download.

So I’ll be working from home tonight, doing what I should have done today. Five little letters: ADOBE.

Breathless Update!

Apparently Adobe’s entire membership section, powered by ColdFusion, is now down. Trying to do anything inside the member section leads to a Chinese “Sorry” page. This might be why the “downloader” failed to authorize my credentials. How much simpler it would be if Adobe simply provided a link to download its software (like in the old days) instead of forcing registered users to jump through broken hoops.

Adobes Muse Lets Designers Make Websites Without Knowing Code | Co. Design.

Jeffrey Zeldman Signs a Contract the Modern Way from Monkey Do! on Vimeo.

WHAT A YEAR 2010 has been. It was the year HTML5 and CSS3 broke wide; the year the iPad, iPhone, and Android led designers down the contradictory paths of proprietary application design and standards-based mobile web application design—in both cases focused on user needs, simplicity, and new ways of interacting thanks to small screens and touch-sensitive surfaces.

It was the third year in a row that everyone was talking about content strategy and designers refused to “just comp something up” without first conducting research and developing a user experience strategy.

CSS3 media queries plus fluid grids and flexible images gave birth to responsive web design (thanks, Beep!). Internet Explorer 9 (that’s right, the browser by Microsoft we’ve spent years grousing about) kicked ass on web standards, inspiring a 10K Apart contest that celebrated what designers and developers could achieve with just 10K of standards-compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. IE9 also kicked ass on type rendering, stimulating debates as to which platform offers the best reading experience for the first time since Macintosh System 7.

Even outside the newest, best browsers, things were better than ever. Modernizr and eCSStender brought advanced selectors and @font-face to archaic browsers (not to mention HTML5 and SVG, in the case of Modernizr). Tim Murtaugh and Mike Pick’s HTML5 Reset and Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate gave us clean starting points for HTML5- and CSS3-powered sites.

Web fonts were everywhere—from the W3C to small personal and large commercial websites—thanks to pioneering syntax constructions by Paul Irish and Richard Fink, fine open-source products like the Font Squirrel @Font-Face Generator, open-source liberal font licensing like FontSpring’s, and terrific service platforms led by Typekit and including Fontdeck, Webtype, Typotheque, and Kernest.

Print continued its move to networked screens. iPhone found a worthy adversary in Android. Webkit was ubiquitous.

Insights into the new spirit of web design, from a wide variety of extremely smart people, can be seen and heard on The Big Web Show, which Dan Benjamin and I started this year (and which won Video Podcast of the Year in the 2010 .net Awards), on Dan’s other shows on the 5by5 network, on the Workers of the Web podcast by Alan Houser and Eric Anderson, and of course in A List Apart for people who make websites.

Zeldman.com: The Year in Review

A few things I wrote here at zeldman.com this year (some related to web standards and design, some not) may be worth reviewing:

iPad as the New Flash 17 October 2010

Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.

Flash, iPad, and Standards 1 February 2010

Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first.

An InDesign for HTML and CSS? 5 July 2010

while our current tools can certainly stand improvement, no company will ever create “the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.” The assumption that a such thing is possible suggests a lack of understanding.

Stop Chasing Followers 21 April 2010

The web is not a game of “eyeballs.” Never has been, never will be. Influence matters, numbers don’t.

Crowdsourcing Dickens 23 March 2010

Like it says.

My Love/Hate Affair with Typekit 22 March 2010

Like it says.

You Cannot Copyright A Tweet 25 February 2010

Like it says.

Free Advice: Show Up Early 5 February 2010

Love means never having to say you’re sorry, but client services means apologizing every five minutes. Give yourself one less thing to be sorry for. Take some free advice. Show up often, and show up early.

Outside Reading

A few things I wrote elsewhere might repay your interest as well:

The Future of Web Standards 26 September, for .net Magazine

Cheap, complex devices such as the iPhone and the Droid have come along at precisely the moment when HTML5, CSS3 and web fonts are ready for action; when standards-based web development is no longer relegated to the fringe; and when web designers, no longer content to merely decorate screens, are crafting provocative, multi-platform experiences. Is this the dawn of a new web?

Style vs. Design written in 1999 and slightly revised in 2005, for Adobe

When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don’t start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name.

Happy New Year, all!

STYLE VERSUS DESIGN READS like it was written this morning. In fact, I wrote the original version in 1999, when I had a monthly web design column going at Adobe.com. In 2005, Adobe asked if I’d mind updating the piece. I changed a couple of words and they agreed that the revision worked. For although the web had changed tremendously between 1999 and 2005, the issue I addressed in my article had not. This afternoon, while importing some old Ma.gnolia bookmarks into Pinboard, I came upon Adobe’s HTML version of the 2005 revision to “Style vs. Design.” I read it again, and tweeted the link. Within minutes, designers were responding. Many thought the piece was new. For what I said in that article over eleven years ago still rings true, although there are now more designers who see things as I do. It’s nice that a piece of writing about web design could remain relevant for over a decade. But it’s also a bit sad. See what you think.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare for the game of all games, a design denouement one incredible year in the making, the ultimate test of two unlikely heroes with even less likely names.

Noper vs. Reyes. Layer Tennis 2010 Season 3 championship. Fought live, with live commentary by yours truly. Presented by Adobe CS5 via Coudal Partners.

The Match begins 1:00 pm Chicago time (2:00 pm in NYC, 9:00 pm in Bucharest).

See you there.

iPad. Never have so many embraced a great product for exactly the wrong reasons.

Too many designers and publishers see the iPad as an opportunity to do all the wrong things—things they once did in Flash—without the taint of Flash.

In the minds of many, the iPad is like Flash that pays. You can cram traditional publishing content into an overwrought, novelty Flash interface as The New York Times once did with its T magazine. You may win a design award but nobody will pay you for that content. Ah, but do the same thing on the iPad instead, and subscribers will pay—maybe not enough to save publishing, but enough to keep the content coming and at least some journalists, editors, and art directors employed.

It’s hard to argue with money and jobs, and I wouldn’t dream of doing so.

Alas, the early success of a few publications—publications so good they would doubtless survive with or without iPad—is creating a stampede that will not help most magazines and interfaces that will not please most readers.

Everything we’ve learned in the past decade about preferring open standards to proprietary platforms and user-focused interfaces to masturbatory ones is forgotten as designers and publishers once again scramble to create novelty interfaces no one but them cares about.

While some of this will lead to useful innovation, particularly in the area of gestural interfaces, that same innovation can just as readily be accomplished on websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—and the advantage of creating websites instead of iPad apps is that websites work for everyone, on browsers and devices at all price points. That, after all, is the point of the web. It’s the point of web standards and progressive enhancement.

Luke Wroblewski’s Touch Gesture Reference Guide gives designers plenty of ammunition to create dynamic user experiences that work on a wide variety of mobile phones and devices (including iPad) while these same sites can use traditional desktop browser effects like hover to offer equally rich experiences on non-touch-enabled browsers. Unless your organization’s business model includes turning a profit by hiring redundant, competing teams, “Write once, publish everywhere” makes more economic sense than “Write once, publish to iPad. Write again, publish to Kindle. Write again, publish to some other device.”

I’m not against the iPad. I love my iPad. It’s great for storing and reading books, for browsing websites, for listening to music and watching films, for editing texts, presentations, and spreadsheets, for displaying family photos, and on and on. It’s nearly all the stuff I love about my Mac plus a great ePub reader slipped into a little glass notebook I play like a Theremin.

I’m not against iPad apps. Twitterific for iPad is by far the best way to use Twitter. After all, Twitter is really an internet service, not a website; Twitter’s own site, while leaps ahead of where it used to be, is hardly the most useful or delightful way to access its service. Gowalla for iPad is my constant companion. I dread the idea of traveling without it. And there are plenty of other great iPad apps I love, from Bloom, an “endless music machine” by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers, to Articles, which turns Wikipedia into an elegant reading experience, to Mellotronics for iPad, an uncannily accurate Mellotron simulator packed with 13 authentic voices—“the same production tapes featured on Strawberry Fields Forever” and other classic tracks (not to mention tracks by nouveau retro bands like Eels).

There are apps that need to be apps, demand to be apps, and I admire and learn from them like every other designer who’s alive at this moment.

I’m just not sold on what the magazines are doing. Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.

“Cheap, complex devices such as the iPhone and the Droid have come along at precisely the moment when HTML5, CSS3 and web fonts are ready for action; when standards-based web development is no longer relegated to the fringe; and when web designers, no longer content to merely decorate screens, are crafting provocative, multi-platform experiences. Is this the dawn of a newer, more mature, more ubiquitous web?”

—The Future of Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

Originally written for .net magazine, Issue No. 206, published 17 August in UK and this month in the US in “Practical Web Design” Magazine. Now you can read the article even if you can’t get your hands on these print magazines.

See also: I Guest-Edit .net magazine.

Vincent (no last name given) has designed a beautiful, extremely useful, feature-rich interface design framework for web designers who create their initial design mock-ups in Adobe Illustrator. And it’s free for personal or commercial use (credit link required).

The set includes:

• GUI library – Hundreds of vector elements for interface design
• Minimal UI icons set – 260 vector icons for Illustrator
• Styles library – 200 styles to apply in Illustrator

I’d pay cash money for the color schemes alone: 330 swatches harmonized with graphic styles for backgrounds, typography and other GUI interface elements.

The back-link requirement may be a deal breaker in some situations. I’d happily use these GUI icons on a personal project, but I might refrain on a client project if it seemed awkward to include a widget credit on the site. (It all depends on the client.)

That possible caveat aside, this is an extraordinary set of widgets and gizmos many web designers will want to have in their tool kit.

In “CSS is the new Photoshop” (?), Adobe’s John Nack correctly observes, as have many of us, that “Cascading Style Sheets can create a great deal of artwork now, without reliance on bitmap graphics.” Nack quotes Shawn Blanc, one of several concurrent authors of the phrase “CSS is the new Photoshop,” who cites as evidence Louis Harboe’s iOS icons and Jeff Batterton’s iPhone, both designed entirely in CSS and both only viewable in the latest Webkit browsers, Safari 5 and Google Chrome 5.

He’s not alone: Håkon Wium Lie from Opera predicts that CSS3 could eliminate half the images used on the Web. You can use various graphical tools to generate things like CSS gradients and rounded corners. As people can do more and more in code, it makes sense to ask whether even to use Photoshop in designing Web content.

I think Adobe should be freaking out a bit, but in a constructive way.

So far, so good. But Nack’s “constructive” suggestion for Adobe, quoting Michael Slade, is to create “the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.”

Nack acknowledges that this will be difficult. I propose that it will be impossible. Says Nack:

As I noted the other day, “Almost no one would look inside, say, an EPS file and harrumph, ‘Well, that’s not how I’d write PostScript’–but they absolutely do that with HTML.”

Well, there is a reason they absolutely do that with HTML. PostScript is a programming language designed to describe page layouts and text shapes in a world of known, fixed dimensions (the world of print), with no underlying semantics. PostScript doesn’t care whether an element is a paragraph, a headline, or a list item. It doesn’t care if a bit of content on one page cites another bit of content on a different page. PostScript is a visual plotting language. And HTML is anything but.

HTML is a language with roots in library science. It doesn’t know or care what content looks like. (Even HTML5 doesn’t care what content looks like.) Neither a tool like Photoshop, which is all about pixels, nor a tool like Illustrator, which is all about vectors, can generate semantic HTML, because the visual and the semantic are two different things.

Moreover, authoring good HTML and CSS is an art, just as authoring good poetry or designing beautiful comps in Photoshop is an art. Expecting Photoshop to write the kind of markup and CSS you and I write at our best is like challenging TextMate to convert semantic HTML into a visually appropriate and aesthetically pleasing layout. Certain kinds of human creativity and expertise cannot be reproduced by machines. Yes, there are machines that create music, and a composer like Brian Eno can program such systems to create somewhat interesting aural landscapes, but such music can never be the Eroica or “This Land is Your Land,” because there is no algorithm with the creative and life experience of Beethoven or Woody Guthrie.

Adobe already has a fine product in the code arena. Some hand coders knock Dreamweaver, but it does about as good a job as is possible of converting groupings of meaningless pixels into chunks of valid code. It is unreasonable to expect more than that from a tool that begins by importing a multi-layered Photoshop comp. Of course you can do much more with Dreamweaver if you use its code merely as a starting point, or if you use it simply as a hand-coding environment. But that’s the point. Some things, to be done right, must be done by the human mind.

There’s something to what Nack says. Photoshop could be made friendlier to serious web designers. Adobe could also stop ignoring Fireworks, as Fireworks is a better starting place for web design. They might even interview serious, standards-oriented web designers and start from scratch, as a new tool will suffer from fewer political constraints and user expectations than a beloved existing product with deep features and multiple audiences.

But while our current tools can certainly stand improvement, no company will ever create “the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.” The very assumption that a such thing is possible suggests a lack of understanding of the professionalism, wisdom, and experience required to create good HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Fortunately, a better understanding is easy to come by.

Via yfrog.com/83n4fp. See also:

• TechCrunch: Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight, by MG Siegler, 13 May 2010
• Apple.com: Thoughts on Flash, Steve Jobs, April 2010
• The Big Web Show Episode 2: HTML5 For Web Designers
• HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith (A Book Apart, June, 2010)
• Zeldman.com: Flash, iPad, and Standards, 1 February 2010
• Zeldman.com: Steve Jobs and Me on Flash, 29 April 2010

Note Steve’s concluding paragraph:

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Sounds familiar.

Except Steve Jobs’s subtext isn’t “web standards, web standards, web standards, told you so.”

Except it kind of is.

Around the world in ten layers with Coudal Partners: Ten designers in ten cities, fifteen minutes at a time. A single Photoshop file will circumnavigate the globe starting in Portland and ending in Tokyo with yours truly, Jeffrey Zeldman, providing the layer-by-layer commentary. Don’t miss this one, live Friday, starting at 2pm Chicago time.

Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis presented by Adobe Creative Suite.

It boils down to control. I’ve written several times that I believe Apple controls the entire source code to iPhone OS. (No one has disputed that.) There’s no bug Apple can’t try to fix on their own. No performance problem they can’t try to tackle. No one they need to wait for. That’s just not true for Mac OS X, where a component like Flash Player is controlled by Adobe.

I say what Apple cares about controlling is the implementation. That’s why they started the WebKit project. That’s why Apple employees from the WebKit team are leaders and major contributors of the HTML5 standards drive. The bottom line for Apple, at the executive level, is selling devices. … If Apple controls its own implementation, then no matter how popular the web gets as a platform, Apple will prosper so long as its implementation is superior.

Likewise with Google’s interest in the open web and HTML5. … So long as the web is open, Google’s success rests within its own control. And in the same way Apple is confident in its ability to deliver devices with best-of-breed browsing experiences, Google is confident in its ability to provide best-of-breed search results and relevant ads. In short, Google and Apple have found different ways to bet with the web, rather than against the web.

Related posts, on the off-chance you missed them:

• Flash, iPad, and Standards (zeldman.com, 1 Feb 2010)
• [Untitled post on Tomorrow's Computing Systems] (stevenf, no date given)
• Semantic Flash, Slippery When Wet (Daniel Mall, A List Apart, 26 February 2007)
• On The iPad (Alex Payne, 28 January 2010)

The first part of my post of 1 February was not an attack on Flash. It described a way of working with Flash that also supports users who don’t have access to Flash. I’ve followed and advocated that approach for 10 years. It has nothing to do with Apple’s recent decisions and everything to do with making content available to people and search engines.

It’s how our agency and others use Flash; we’ve published articles on the subject in our magazine, notably Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet by Daniel Mall.

We do the same thing with JavaScript—make sure the site works for users who don’t have JavaScript. It’s called web development. It’s what all of us should do.

My point was simply that if you’re an all-Flash shop that never creates a semantic HTML underpinning, it’s time to start creating HTML first—because an ever-larger number of your users are going to be accessing your site via devices that do not support Flash.

That’s not Apple “zealotry.” It’s not Flash hate. It’s a recommendation to my fellow professionals who aren’t already on the accessible, standards-based design train.

THE SECOND PART OF MY POST wasn’t Flash hate. It was a prediction based on the way computing is changing as more people at varying skill levels use computers and the internet, and as the nature of the computer changes.

There will probably always be “expert” computer systems for people like you and me who like to tinker and customize, just as there are still hundreds of thousands of people who hand-code their websites even though there are dozens of dead-simple web content publishing platforms out there these days.

But an increasing number of people will use simpler computers (just as we’ve seen millions of people blog who never wrote a line of HTML).

THE THIRD PART OF MY POST wasn’t Flash hate. It was an observation that Google and Apple, as companies, have more to gain from betting on HTML5 than from pinning their hopes to Adobe. That’s not a deep insight, it’s a statement of the obvious, and making the statement doesn’t equate to hating Adobe or swearing allegiance to Google and Apple—any more than stating that we’re having a cold winter makes me Al Gore’s best friend.

(Although I like Gore, don’t get me wrong. I also like Apple, Google, and Adobe. My admiration for these companies, however, does not impede my ability to make observations about them.)

THE THIRD PART OF MY POST ALSO WASN’T a blind assertion that HTML5, with VIDEO and CANVAS, is ready to replace Flash today, or more adept than Flash, or more accessible than Flash. Flash is currently more capable and it is far more accessible than CANVAS.

We have previously commented on HTML5′s strengths and weaknesses (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C) and are about to publish a book about HTML5 for web designers. HTML5 is rich with potential; Flash is rich with capability and can be made highly accessible.

That it is unstable on Mac and Linux is one reason Apple chose not to include it in its devices; that this omission will change the way some developers create web content is certain. If the first thing it does is encourage them to develop semantic HTML first, that’s a win for everyone who uses the web.

Carry on.