Standards

Web standards for design and communication.

SiteAssist Professional

Released Wednesday, August 27th, SiteAssist Professional creates entire CSS-based websites in minutes. Since that sounds ridiculous and impossible, I’ll say it again: the product creates CSS-based websites in minutes.

ALA 266: next generation sprites, metaphors

CSS Sprites, the next generation. Cartography, the next metaphor for webmaking. Dave Shea and Aaron Rester aim high and score in Issue No. 266 of A List Apart, for people who make websites.

The Survey for People Who Make Websites

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide. Please take the survey and encourage your friends and colleagues who make websites to do likewise.

AEA Boston 2008 session notes

Linked session notes and downloads from An Event Apart Boston 2008.

So long, Boston. We’ll be back.

An Event Apart Boston 2008 is over but the memories and photos linger on.
Eric and I started An Event Apart because we saw the need for a live, concentrated, learning and sharing experience about best practices and inspiration for the standards-based web design community. Thanks to brilliant speakers, phenomenally dedicated and supremely competent staff, [...]

Video: Eric Meyer on generated content

Live onstage at An Event Apart New Orleans, 2008, web design conference co-founder and CSS expert Eric Meyer explains why the W3C’s recommendation to allow browsers to insert quotation marks doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense.

Dear New York Times Mobile

Dear New York Times Mobile Edition:
While we applaud your use of typographically correct punctuation—a cause we ourselves have long advocated—we’d appreciate it even more if you would do it like professionals. Author in Unicode, the cross-platform standard.
Please stop using proprietary Windows characters in a bumbling, amateurish attempt to generate typographically correct open and [...]

ALA 256: map rolling & data viz

In Issue No. 256 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Wilson Miner shares three techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based web navigation patterns, and Paul Smith shows how to replicate Google Maps’ functionality with open source software to produce high-quality mapping applications tailored to your design goals.

Books of Luke and Aarron

In Issue No. 255 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Sign Up Forms Must Die – Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design at Yahoo! and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008), calls for the abolition of sign-up forms where web services are concerned. Via “gradual engagement,” says Luke, we can get people using and caring about our web services instead of frustrating them with forms. And in Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders, 2008), provides an overview of this essential web discipline, explains how it is like SEO but different, and tells how every member of your team can contribute to your site’s content’s findability. You can see Luke and Aarron live at upcoming An Event Apart design conferences in Boston and New Orleans. Plus: they’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace (and staff at ALA). I’m verklempt!

Zeldman on Talk Radio Today

Live today from 3:00 to 4:00 pm Eastern Time, I’m this week’s guest on “Design Matters with Debbie Millman,” the leading internet talk radio show on the “challenging and compelling canvas of today’s design world.”