Category: Standards

Web standards for design and communication.

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37signals A List Apart Accessibility Design development industry Standards work

A List Apart adds Job Board

I have always wanted A List Apart to connect web designers with web design jobs and never gotten around to making it happen. Now, thanks to 37signals, it’s on.

Starting today, the sidebar of A List Apart displays one random job from the 37signals Job Board — a new job on every page. It’s a great match for ALA readers seeking work and web-smart businesses with jobs to offer.

Companies including The New York Times, CNET, Facebook, Adobe, and American Express already use the Job Board to find today’s brightest web minds. Now they will find more of them. The best designers, developers, and information architects in the world read A List Apart, to the tune of 14 million page views a month.

14 million a month! I don’t know of another web publication that reaches so many clued-in professionals. ALA readers are uniquely concerned with accessibility, web standards, and crafting exceptional user experience through deeply considered design, writing, and structure.

Over the years, ALA readers have written to tell us that they owed their careers to skills our magazine helped them hone, and concepts our magazine laid before them. Adding the 37signals Job Board to our sidebar is a logical next step.

I am delighted to think that one day soon, we’ll get email from readers who found great jobs through A List Apart. And I’m even more thrilled to think about all those web standards fans taking their accessibility concerns and user experience chops to great companies like Crate and Barrel, TBWA, and American Express.

Today, the 37signals Job Board comes to A List Apart. Tomorrow, standardistas go to work at leading companies. The revolution will be salaried.

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family glamorous Publishing Standards work writing Zeldman

All in

Three Saturdays ago, my father had a heart attack. Last Saturday, we rushed our baby daughter to the emergency room. In-between, my wife had to undergo scary and uncomfortable medical tests.

Everybody is fine, even my dad (truth in advertising: aspirin really can save your life) but my once-brown goatee has gone shock-white.

Everybody is fine, so take a deep breath and savor the unusually high pollen count.

Something else took place in these same tense two weeks: I finished my book. Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Edition (DWWS 2e) left my hands last night and will reach shelves this summer.

When I agreed to write DWWS 2e, I mistook the job for a quick spruce-up. After all, what I’d said in the first edition about the benefits of standards-based design was still true: accessibility and semantics make your content easier to find and faster and cheaper to distribute. And the browser most people used when I wrote the first edition hadn’t changed in five years, so how tough a rewrite could I be facing? I figured I was looking at an updated screenshot or two, a changed URL, and maybe a couple of sticky notes.

About four months into the grueling (but also magically riveting) process, I realized that what I was doing was writing a book.

A lot of 2e will be familiar to the book’s fans, but a lot is new. And new is work. New is infinite wash-loads of work. Messy, exhausting. At some point in the infinite rinsing and lathering I was told the book had to be finished by last night. And so it has been.

I wouldn’t have made it alone. Erin and Ethan were right in there, carrying me.

I finished. I finished while grappling with sudden existential crises involving the people I love most. But then, my mother died while I was finishing my first book. Books kill.

This is me being cheerful after completing a rather strong second edition.

2e! 2e! My father and daughter and wife are well. My book is good. My song is sung.

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A List Apart Accessibility Design Publishing Standards Tools

WCAG 2: the clock is ticking

This week’s A List Apart leads with accessibility expert Joe Clark’s detailed critique of the proposed WCAG 2 guidelines.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 is an international standard for making sites accessible to people with disabilities. Many nations adhere to WCAG 1.0 as law.

That’s great, except that WCAG 1.0 is seven years old, and parts of it are murkily conceived. The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) committee has toiled for years to offer a second-generation spec that is clearer and more up-to-date. WCAG 2.0 is the result. It was presented to the web community for comment a few weeks ago and achieves “Candidate Recommendation” status at the end of this month.

Although WCAG 2 has its supporters, and although good people have worked hard on it, Joe Clark believes “the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand,” with untestable success criteria and strange new definitions that don’t map to concepts like “page,” “site,” or “valid.”

Because WCAG 1.0 forms the basis of international law and because the standard’s goal is to serve the disabled, the success or failure of WCAG 2 matters to all who use, own, or make websites. Whether you end up agreeing or disagreeing with Joe Clark’s assessment, time is short and the stakes are incredibly high. I urge every web designer to read this article.

Also in this triple issue of A List Apart (and only overshadowed here because the clock on WCAG 2 is ticking) are two other exceptionally fine articles:

World Grows Small: Open Standards for the Global Web

by Molly E. Holzschlag

Molly Holzschlag explains how the practices you already use to create standards-based, accessible websites can serve you in the growing field of internationalization.

Community Creators, Secure Your Code! Part II

by Niklas Bivald

In part two of his two-part series on protecting your community site from malicious cross-site scripting attacks, Niklas Bivald rolls up his trousers and wades into the JavaScript.

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An Event Apart cities Design events Standards

An Event Apart New York City

Join Adam Greenfield, Aaron Gustafson, Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman for two days of design and code in the heart of New York City.

July 10 & 11, 2006
Scandinavia House
58 Park Avenue at 38th Street
New York City 10016

Register before June 9th to save $100 off the price of this special, two-day event.

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A List Apart Accessibility Design development Happy Cog™ industry Publishing Standards

A List Apart 215: triple issue

In a big triple issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

A More Accessible Map
by Seth Duffey
Nifty web maps powered by Google and Yahoo! APIs are all the rage. And rage is what a visually impaired user may feel when trying to use them. Is there a way to make beautiful web maps accessible? In a word, yes. Techy designers, you won’t want to miss this step-by-step guide.
Community Creators, Secure Your Code!
by Niklas Bivald
Don’t be like MySpace. Well, okay, be like MySpace in attracting millions of users. But don’t be like them in exposing your site and your users to virtual vandals. Protect your community site from malicious cross-site scripting attacks. Part one of a two-part series.
Everyware: Always Crashing in the Same Car
by Adam Greenfield
Ubiquitous computing is coming. In some ways, it’s already here. Shouldn’t we think about what we want it to be? In our last issue, we published the introduction to Adam Greenfield’s Everyware. In this issue, we run the book’s conclusion.

It’s spring in this part of the world, and this issue’s color scheme by art director Jason Santa Maria reflects that pleasing circumstance. (ALA’s color scheme changes every issue, but you knew that.) Production editor Aaron Gustafson contributed significantly to the issue’s editorial content. Watercolor illustration by Kevin Cornell. Editorial assistance by Erin Lynch. Behind-the-scenes system improvements by Dan Benjamin. Erin Kissane edits the magazine. Published by Happy Cog.

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Design industry Publishing Standards writing

Everyware

Adam Greenfield has written one of the most provocative books in years. If the right people read it, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing may do for the coming, computerless computing interface what Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things did for design generally. Like Norman, Greenfield argues for good design not as an aesthetic issue but as an ethical and business imperative. There is an urgency and clarity to every word.

Everyware is both a prescription and a warning. Although films like Minority Report have made such ubicomp staples as the gestural interface look a bit silly, these kinds of interactivity are coming soon to a wall or object near you. Depending on who designs them and by what principles, they will work beautifully or badly. Everyware will enhance our lives by anticipating our needs or it will destroy our privacy — or both.

Besides Don Norman’s book, the other piece of writing I sometimes thought of as I read Everyware was Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Writing in 1937, Benjamin pondered what the existence of photographic reproduction did to the status of the unique work of art. If the Mona Lisa can be reproduced by lithography, what is the value of the Mona Lisa?

It’s not that Greenfield writes like Benjamin (he doesn’t). It’s that both writers see and can describe changes in the world to which their contemporaries are oblivious. Greenfield is a friend and former member of Happy Cog so I have an interest in seeing his book do well. But if I didn’t know him or couldn’t stand him I would still highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about how design and technology are shaping our time.

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An Event Apart Design film links music Standards Tools

Heartwarming

Baseball weather has come to NYC. And a baseball stadium is where we’ll hold An Event Apart Atlanta in just a few days’ time. If global warming worked the other way — if the winters were getting colder each year — the world’s governments would have already worked together to reverse global warming. But when winter grows milder and spring arrives sooner, it feels so good it’s hard to realize how bad it is. But I digress.

We’re busy prepping for Atlanta, so here are some links:

Minolta quits camera biz
A former ad client, at one time the 3rd largest camera maker in the world, can’t compete against digital.
“Would you write your life story in pencil?” was an ad I tried to sell them for their Maxxum line of high quality, 35mm point-and-shoot SLRs. (Instead they bought “More Maxxum Magic!”, a line I did not write for them.) Even so, it’s sad to see them go.
Monochrom Brandmarker
An attempt to evaluate the power of brands by making Austrian people draw twelve logos from memory, 25 people per brand. Via Coudal.com.
Magnolia Blossom
Mac OS X dashboard widget embeds social networking in your desktop: “Watch websites scroll across as they are bookmarked by ma.gnolia.com members. Spend less time scrolling through pages of text and find those eye-catching sites now!”
Gapers Block
Clean, good-looking, well written Chicago blog.
In Progress: Logo Design (A)
Cameron Moll on the National Gazette identity he and Jason Santa Maria are designing.
In Progress: Logo Design (B)
Jason Santa Maria on the National Gazette identity he and Cameron Moll are designing.
Top 15 Skylines in the World v. 3.0
An urban planner picks his Top 15 skylines. Via Gapers Block.
Dieter Steffmann typefaces
Immense archive of Dieter Steffmann fonts. “Acorn Initials” is typical Steffmann work. Re-blogged from March 2004.
CNN.com redesigns
1024 wide. Looks great. Pity about non-validating table layout. Via Hivelogic.com.
coComment
In one central place, track comments you’ve left on blogs all over the place.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
“…total access to original tracks with remix and sampling… Download all the multitracks on two of the songs. Through … Creative Commons licenses, you are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like. Add them to your own song or create a new one. Visitors are welcome to post their mixes or songs that incorporate these audio files on the site for others to hear and rate.”
Drupal
Open source content management platform that cares about accessibility and standards.
Airbag – Styrofoam
Adventures in food management.
Designers must write
“As my ability to shape both written and oral communication improves, I am better equipped to direct the work of others.” (Via Cameron Moll.)
In Search of a Comprehensive Type Design Theory
“Type designers might be convinced that our profession is vital to society, but we wouldn’t risk going on strike.”
Ironic Sans – Pre-pixelated clothes
“Stop worrying about whether or not the producer of that Reality TV show you’re on will pixelate your carefully chosen t-shirt. Beat them to the punch with pre-pixelated products!” (Via K10k.net.)
Thank You for Smoking – main titles
Beautiful! via Stan.
America’s Technology Future at Risk
A new study released by the Economic Strategy Institute explains why U.S. companies can’t compete in key new business sectors, and offers a variety of regulatory and investment prescriptions (via Thomas L. Friedman).
Teaching at Risk: Progress and Potholes
The Final Report of the Teaching Commission (via Thomas L. Friedman).
It’s a great time to start a business
Six reasons to start a business today (by 37signals’s David Heinemeier Hansson).
IE7 Improvements and Bug Tracking
Eric Meyer weighs in.
W3C: Failed Commitments?
Much ado about nothing. Forest. Trees.
Happy Doomsday to You!
“Washington was about one horseman short of an apocalypse yesterday.”
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Accessibility An Event Apart cities Design events Standards

An Event Apart Chicago

Announcing An Event Apart Chicago. Join Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Jim Coudal and Zeldman in the windy city for a mind-blowing day of insights into design, development, and how to stay happy running a creative business. Register now to reserve your seat and save $50 off the admission price.

Friday, June 2nd, 2006
9:00 – 5:00
The Gleacher Center
450 North Cityfront Plaza Drive
Chicago, IL 60611-4316
(Map)

The Speakers

An Event Apart offers the opportunity to meet and learn from creative and technical stars who influence the direction of our industry:

  • Jim Coudal runs Coudal Partners, a design firm in Chicago. They work for companies and they build companies, like Jewelboxing, The Show, and The Deck. Before making websites, films, and real-world products, Jim Coudal was an ad creative director. His insights into conceiving and selling great ideas are not to be missed.
  • Jason Santa Maria has been recognized for designing stylistic and imaginative (yet also usable and effective) web interfaces. He recently won acclaim for the A List Apart redesign, whose secrets he’ll share with attendees.
  • Eric Meyer has conducted complex standards-based makeovers and led intensive multi-day training sessions for such clients as Apple Computer, America On-Line, Yahoo!, Macromedia, Wells Fargo Bank, Cornell University, and others. No one has a deeper or more practical grasp of CSS; no one can teach it like Eric.
  • Founder of A List Apart and Happy Cog, former leader of The Web Standards Project, and author of Designing With Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman helped bring standards to browsers and the design community. He serves clients from Ad Age and Amnesty International USA to Lexico (Dictionary.com) and the United Nations Womens Development Fund.

The Space

The Gleacher Center is 50,000 square feet of high-tech conference space, smack in the heart of Chicago’s business district, blocks from the Loop and steps from Magnificent Mile shopping, restaurants, and hotels. An Event Apart will unfold in one of its spacious, uncrowded lecture halls, where every seat has plenty of room and every view is a good one.

Gourmet lunch and other catering throughout the day will include vegetarian options. Spectacular river and lake views in the separate dining lounge will make you forget how good the food is.

The Sponsors

Lunch is courtesy of Media Temple (“set your sites on us”), web host to the stars. We thank them for their continued support. AIGA Press and New Riders (“Voices That Matter”) will also be on hand to make sure attendees have reading materials to stay mentally stimulated after the event.

And speaking of mental stimulation, new sponsor Jewelboxing will throw a post-event Happy Hour And A Half at a Chicago pub. Schmooze, hobnob, network, or beg for a job while enjoying free cocktails. Further details will come soon.

A good time will be had!

The Deal

Our Philadelphia and Atlanta events sold out fast and we were unable to accommodate many who wished to attend. Chicago, given its size and the depth of its design and user experience communities, will sell out even faster. Seating is limited and availability is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Register during our Early Bird special to save your seat and shave $50 off the price of admission. The full day, including tasty catered lunch and goodies, costs $549. But if you register by May 1st, you can attend for $499. See you in Chicago!

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events glamorous industry Standards

Unmixed

A few weeks back, Microsoft’s Robert Scoble invited me to join Bill Gates, Kelly Goto, Roger Black, Lynda Weinman and other luminaries at Mix 06, a Microsoft-hosted “72-hour conversation” that wraps today in Las Vegas. Purpose of event: to “mix the next web now.”

It was like receiving an invitation from the emperor.

You may think “Web 2.0” and the “next web” are meaningful, industry-shaping concepts, or you may view them as marketing spin. You may trust that Microsoft wishes to be a citizen of the emerging state or suspect that it wants to be king. Whatever you hope or fear, and whatever value you place on such gabfests, to participate would surely be to learn. Plus you’d get to rub elbows with pirates and pundits from Tim O’Reilly and Marc Canter to Molly Holzschlag and some of the big brains behind eBay and Amazon.

Yet after at least two minutes of agonizing inner debate, I declined Microsoft’s invitation. Timing, which is also the secret of comedy, was the problem. Mix 06 followed SXSW too closely. As a business owner, I could afford to stay away from my agency for one week, but not for two.

Although a lot of designers, writers, and technologists seem to have been able to hopscotch from Austin to Vegas without so much as checking their office mailbox, I couldn’t.

Here in New York City there were jobs to finish and meetings to attend. There were clients to see and accountants and attorneys to see and pay. In Las Vegas they might be polishing up HTML 6 or figuring out how to make readers write all the content and pay for it, but back in my studio I had voice mails and RFPs and PDFs and Photoshop comps to sort through. (Just like you!)

Eric Meyer, one of the smartest people I have ever known, is at Mix 06 and has recorded some impressions, the most designer-relevant of which concern how much more CSS work Microsoft plans to do on IE7. (Answer: none.)

There is also a photo of Eric Meyer excessively enjoying free Internet Explorer stickers and bottled water.

Simon St Laurent, another of the smartest people I have ever known, has written a next web column on why the XML web, semantic web, and services web haven’t happened yet (and may never) while AJAX/”Web 2.0″ has, kind-of. Reading Simon’s column might almost be as good as attending Mix 06.

And Tim O’Reilly has blogged what he was planning to talk about while sharing a stage with Bill Gates. (And if I were sharing a stage with Bill Gates you can bet I’d blog it, too. After all, here I am doing nothing and getting a nice post out of it.)

There’s also a post and video of the actual conversation between Bill Gates and Tim O’Reilly, although, oddly, the video is not in QuickTime format.

Tim O’Reilly starts the conversation by telling Bill Gates how a Tim O’Reilly blog post launched Web 2.0 and led thousands of people to buy and sell stuff. That is as far as I got watching the video.

I guess if you are talking to Bill Gates you have to tell him who you are, even if you are Tim O’Reilly.

Well, anyway, I didn’t go to Mix 06, so I have lost untold thousands of pundit karma points. But this morning I read Hippos Go Berserk! to my kid. And even though we have read that book together at least 562 times, she found it fresh and exciting and new. And so did I.

Good stories stay new.

Fascinating and industry-changing revelations are likely emerging from Mix 06. I’m a bit sorry to miss the first utterances of them. But however brilliant such revelations may be, and however far their ripples spread, my web will not change. Whatever the pundits and pirates may say this week, my web is about content.

No matter what’s said at any conference, my web will continue to be about good writing and good design. Because that’s what I care about. And your web is your web because you care about what you care about. And whatever that is, there’s plenty of it to be found or made on this big web we share.

No matter how many new marketing phrases and acronyms emerge (some even with concepts attached), and no matter how much money some people make or lose betting on them (and the choice of Las Vegas as venue is telling), what I value does not change.

And that’s what I learned at Mix 06.

Categories
Accessibility Design development events industry Standards writing

Fine Corinthian Leather

Sophia Marie Dominey
A very healthy eight pounds, eleven ounces.
Dissecting The Process
or: How an A List Apart Illustration Comes Together, by the illustrator himself, Kevin Cornell.
simplifier lab
Phoebe Espiritu’s fine blog on the quest for simplicity and minimalism in design.
Rogue Librarian: SXSWi Takeaways
Carrie Bickner Zeldman’s writeup of her SXSW Interactive panel on Digital Preservation and Blogs. See also:
Digital Preservation Panel at SXSWi
Librarian Avengers’s notes on the same panel. See also:
Digital Preservation: What and Whom Are We Saving?
Bill Anderson’s notes on the same panel.
Vantan.org
Personal site of Vanessa Tan, devoted Netizen and musician, blogging from Singapore.
Aspen Design Summit
AIGA-sponsored retreat.
This is Powazek
Beauteous and well-written site of cofounder of JPG Magazine (and creator of bunches of other fab web content, none of which I need to tell you, ’cause you know)
Behind the WaSP Redesign
Designer Clarke discusses creative process. See also:
WaSP Annual General Meeting
Transcribed by Muffin Research Labs.
Does Your Blog Have a Business?
SXSW Interactive panel transcribed by Auscillate.com.
CSS Floatutorial
In CSS layout, float is all. Maxdesign’s step-by-step guide shows how to float elements such as images, drop caps, and next and back buttons to create image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts.
CSS Tweak
Now with in-page Help! Andy Peatling’s free web-based tool optimizes your CSS files. “It will take any CSS file and optimize the syntax, grouping your style declarations into shorthand where possible. It can also remove comments, and strip whitespace for maximum compression.”
A brief history of the “clenched fist” image
Like it says.
GrayBit v0.5 Beta
“GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast.”
Interior Desecrations
Horrible home design from the classic halls of Lileks.
George Bush: I Don’t Know Much About Designing Rugs
In Design Observer.
Accessible Web Developers
A public group at ma.gnolia. Creating accessible (and mobile-friendly) sites.
Brit Pack
Proud members.
More Ma.gnolia Marks
See all 345 (and counting) of Apartness’s bookmarks.
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development Redesigns Standards Tools

Zeldman.com Reloaded

With a book half-written, two conferences looming, and waves of client work smashing the levees, it seemed a good time to change hosts and funnel this old hand-tooled site into a modern content management system.

The site is now powered by WordPress (why?) and hosted by Media Temple (why?). The hand-rolled summaries feed has retired. In its place is full-text RSS 2.0. There is also a full-text Atom feed for those who like their tofu extra crunchy.

Feeds and browsers

As the DNS rolls over, revealing this post, the retired RSS feed will seamlessly redirect to the new. If you’re reading this but seeing the wrong feed when you click the little RSS badge in your browser’s address bar, you’re using Apple’s Safari, and it’s clutching dead files in its cache. Quit the browser and restart OS X to make Safari find the new feed.

(Safari users may not need to do any of this, of course. Bang-your-head-against-the-desk Safari caching problems typically only affect site owners and developers.)

Hacky sack

I wanted WordPress to do things my way, which meant getting under the hood. I needed to finish before SXSW, which starts tomorrow. And I didn’t have time to learn anything new.

So I asked Noel Jackson (home, agency, software) to do the light hacking required to make WordPress my beast. He made it happen well and fast.

Still to come

Haven’t implemented comments yet. Still considering how best to do so. May not get around to it until after An Event Apart Atlanta. Comments. Gar. After nearly 11 years without. Huge. Gotta ponder. As for My Glamorous Life, for the time being that part of the site is sealed off until I figure out how (if at all) I want to carry it forward.

Basically, though, we’re open for business. Welcome back. (If you haven’t read Why WordPress? and Why Media Temple?, now might be a good time to do that.)

[tags]zeldman, wordpress, blog[/tags]

Categories
development industry Standards

Selling AJAX by the pound

On Valentine’s Day the U.S. Government granted a patent on AJAX to an obscure web shop that promptly announced plans to “license” the technology thousands of sites and products are using. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I suspect it will involve lawyers.

Categories
Accessibility Design industry Standards

Beneath the law, beyond the validator

O say, can you see? If not, can you sue?
Designing With Web Standards made the point that an inaccessible site could get its owner in trouble. Now a blind student is suing Target, claiming that its inaccessible site violates the Americans With Disabilities Act and various U.S. state laws:
Unitless and Somewhat Slightly Dazed
Although the W3C validator claims that A List Apart’s CSS is flawed, our CSS is actually fine; the validator has a known bug that causes it to incorrectly flag unitless line-heights as errors. So why write unitless line-heights? Eric Meyer, who created A List Apart’s CSS, explains. His post is not only the best primer I’ve ever seen on the subject, it is the only primer I’ve ever seen on the subject—and the only one you need.
Categories
Design industry Standards Tools

Don’t be a beta hater

Yes, Happy Cog has a layout problem in Internet Explorer 7 beta. Not to worry: According to Molly Holzschlag of The Web Standards Project, Microsoft has fixed the problem, as we’ll see in a future IE7 release. The current beta chokes on this rule:

div#headwrap h1	{
	background: transparent url(/i/happycog.gif)
		top left no-repeat;
	margin: 0;
	border: 0;
	padding: 0;
	padding-top: 100px;
	overflow: hidden;
	height: 0px !important; /* for most browsers */
	height /**/:100px; /* for pre 6.0 IE Win */
	}

It’s an image replacement technique that uses an alternate box model hack.

Designers use box model hacks to compensate for inaccuracies in the way some browsers (mostly Microsoft’s) calculate element widths with respect to padding and borders. I wrote this rule to insert my agency’s logo at the top of the page in visual browsers while presenting a text equivalent for screen readers and nongraphical browsers. The hacks force older Microsoft browsers to display these elements correctly.

When Microsoft released IE5, it was great for its day, but not always accurate. When they released IE6, it was better but not perfect. The company then declared victory and announced that the browser was dead and there would be no more IE browsers forever.

So designers got busy compensating for the standards deficiencies of IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 (and other companies’ browsers), using hacks like those seen here. The idea is to take the hackery out of markup, where it never belonged, and hide it in style sheets.

IE7 beta’s standards accuracy is already very good and getting better, and, despite what you might have heard to the contrary, Microsoft’s engineers are working with the community (and in particular with The Web Standards Project) to identify and fix CSS bugs and errors and to compensate for hacks like the one seen here. Using IE7? Finding bugs? Microsoft and The Web Standards Project want to hear from you.

Categories
A List Apart Design Standards

A List Apart 211

In the 211th edition of A List Apart, for people who make webites:

  • In Search of the Holy Grail — Matthew Levine’s three-column CSS layout avoids the usual semantic sacrifices. Is it the ultimate of its kind?
  • Home Page Goals — Indie web powerhouse Derek Powazek articulates the unique set of design goals a home page requires to create a smart and welcoming impression.

Plus, listen up, ALA readers! A List Apart wants to know what you love—and hate—about the web right now…whatever makes you swoon or drives you nuts. We’ll feature a selection of responses in our next issue.