Category: work

Footprints in the sand.

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A Book Apart books Brands Browsers Code Collectibles Community content CSS CSS3 Design E-Books editorial eric meyer HTML HTML5 Small Business Standards State of the Web The Profession This never happens to Gruber Web Design Web Design History Web Standards work writing XHTML

Top Web Books of 2010

“It’s been a great year for web design books; the best we can remember for a while, in fact!” So begins Goburo’s review of the Top Web Books of 2010. The list is extremely selective, containing only four books. But what books! They are: Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design (Five Simple Steps); Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); Dan Cederholm’s CSS3 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); and Eric Meyer’s Smashing CSS (Wiley and Sons).

I’m thrilled to have had a hand in three of the books, and to be a friend and business partner to the author of the fourth. It may also be worth noting that three of the four books were published by scrappy, indie startup publishing houses.

Congratulations, all. And to you, good reading (and holiday nerd gifting).

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Big Web Show books Brands business Career content Dan Benjamin New York City people Publishing Respect Self-Employment Small Business speaking The Big Web Show The Profession work writing

Gary Vaynerchuk on The Big Web Show Episode 26

The Big Web Show

GARY VAYNERCHUK is our guest on Episode #26 of The Big Web Show, taped live before an internet audience at 1:00 PM ET Thursday 4 November at live.5by5.tv. Gary is the creator of Wine Library TV, the author of the New York Times bestselling book Crush It!, and the co-founder with his brother AJ of VaynerMedia, a boutique agency that works with personal brands, consumer brands, and startups.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is recorded live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

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art art direction Design experience glamorous The Essentials work writing Zeldman

Pixy Stix | Jason Santa Maria

I wrote a true story of  love, obsession, heartbreak, and candy and my friend Jason Santa Maria art directed it. I’m proud of this tiny, fast-reading story, which is like condensed essence of me (and all these years later, nothing has really changed) and I love what Jason’s done with the page. Please enjoy Pixy Stix, the October 19th Candygram.

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Publications Publishing work Working

The Self-Published Author

I didn’t have much of a marketing plan other than e-mailing my friends and writing to people who had book-review sites and asking them if they would like a free copy. But the word got around. Soon I was deluged with e-mail, and within days I started getting checks in the mail. Many dozens of ’em. Mostly from the United States, but also from Sweden, Australia, Singapore …

Using the internet to reach an audience and distribute work traditional publishers reject. Novelist edition. Jane Friedman interviews John Sundman in “There Are No Rules – Building an Enthusiastic Fan Base as a Self-Published Author,” Writer’s Digest.

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Accessibility Advocacy Blogs and Blogging business Community content strategy data Formats glamorous HTML Ideas industry Publications Publishing Respect State of the Web The Essentials The Profession W3C work writing

Posthumous Hosting and Digital Culture

THE DEATHS of Leslie Harpold and Brad Graham, in addition to being tragic and horrible and sad, have highlighted the questionable long-term viability of blogs, personal sites, and web magazines as legitimate artistic and literary expressions. (Read this, by Rogers Cadenhead.)

Cool URIs don’t change, they just fade away. When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

Now, not every blog post or “Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet” piece deserves to live forever. But there’s gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes. We are not clairvoyants, so we cannot say which fledgling, presently little-read web publications will matter to future historians. Thus logic and the cultural imperative urge us to preserve them all. But how?

The death of the good in the jaws of time is not limited to internet publications, of course. Film decays, books (even really good ones) constantly go out of print, digital formats perish. Recorded music that does not immediately find an audience disappears from the earth.

Digital subscriptions were supposed to replace microfilm, but American libraries, which knew we were racing toward recession years before the actual global crisis came, stopped being able to pay for digital newspaper and magazine descriptions nearly a decade ago. Many also (even fancy, famous ones) can no longer collect—or can only collect in a limited fashion. Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

Thanks to budget shortfalls and format wars, our traditional media, literature, and arts are perishing faster than ever before. Nothing conceived by the human mind, except Heaven and nuclear winter, is eternal.

Still, when it comes to instant disposability, web stuff is in a category all its own.

Unlike with other digital expressions, format is not the problem: HTML, CSS, and backward-compatible web browsers will be with us forever. The problem is, authors pay for their own hosting.

(There are other problems: the total creative output of someone I follow is likely distributed across multiple social networks as well as a personal site and Twitter feed. How to connect those dots when the person has passed on? But let’s leave that to the side for the moment.)

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting.

A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

Categories
business Google Standards State of the Web work

Information Wants To Be Second-Rate

Thousands of … filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day. The company’s ambitions are so enormous as to be almost surreal: to predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results. To get there, Demand is using an army of [impoverished filmmakers and writers] to feverishly crank out articles and videos. They shoot slapdash instructional videos with titles like “How To Draw a Greek Helmet” and “Dog Whistle Training Techniques.” They write guides about lunch meat safety and nonprofit administration. They pump out an endless stream of bulleted lists and tutorials about the most esoteric of subjects.

via The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model

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DWWS Education Publications Publishing Web Design Web Standards work writing Zeldman

What’s new in DWWS 3e

Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition

The 3rd Edition of Designing With Web Standards is coming soon to a bookstore near you. Abetted mightily by our secret cabal of interns, co-author Ethan Marcotte, technical editor Aaron Gustafson, copyeditor Rose Weisburd, editor Erin Kissane and I have worked hard to create what we hope is not merely an update, but a significant revision to the foundational web standards text.

Packed with new ideas

After years of stasis, the world of standards-based design is exploding with new ideas and possibilities. Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition captures this moment, makes sense of it, and keeps you smartly ahead of the pack.

From HTML 5 to web fonts, CSS3 to WCAG2, the latest technologies, claims and counter-claims get broken down in classic DWWS style into their easy-to-understand component ideas, helping you pick the course of action that works best for your projects. As always, the core ideas of standards-based design (which never change) get presented with clear insights and up-to-date examples. You’ll find strategies for persuading even the most stubborn boss or client to support accessibility or reconsider what “IE6 support” means—and for handling the other problems we face when trying to bring rational design and development to the unruly web.

Now with more “how”

While this 3rd Edition, like its predecessors, spends a great deal of time on “why,” it also features a lot more “how” than past editions. If you loved the ideas in DWWS, but wished the book was a bit more hands-on, this is the edition you’ve waited for.

Oh, and the color this time? It’s blue, like l’amour.

Pre-order and save

A few chapters remain to be written, but the goal is in sight, and the book will be out this Fall. To celebrate, you can now save 37% when you pre-order Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition from Amazon.com.

There’s a new book mini-site as well, with more content and features to come. The sharp-eyed will notice that the mini-site is set in Franklin Gothic. A web-licensed version of ITC Franklin Pro Medium from Font Bureau has been embedded via standard CSS. It works everywhere, even in IE. (View Source if curious.)

ShortURL: zeldman.com/x/57

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Acclaim Design work

Vote for best of web

Whereas awards for graphic design, art direction, and advertising routinely honor the finest work in their respective fields each year, awards for web work disappoint.

Your typical web awards are a commercial enterprise first, last, and always. Companies pay to enter work, pay to attend, and pay for their awards. The same thing happens in graphic design, art direction, and advertising shows, of course, but those shows mean something because they are juried by the top practitioners, and everyone in those fields who does great work submits it.

By contrast, people writing and designing the most important websites and applications tend to ignore web competitions. They neither judge nor submit. This has a distorting effect in two directions. And that is why, if you view the results of a typical juried web awards show, you may see work you’ve never heard of, and that doesn’t strike you as particularly good, carrying the day.

The .net magazine awards 2009 are a rare exception, put together by people who actually live and breathe the web. I’m honored to be one of this year’s judges. I’m even more delighted to see who I rub shoulders with in that capacity. Most of all, I applaud the list of worthy nominees. Voting for the .net “best of the web” closes 12 October 2009, but why wait? Vote today.

ShortURL: zeldman.com/x/53

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Design Web Design Websites work Zeldman zeldman.com

Past Blast

Among the pleasures of running an independent personal site is the accidental discovery of an ancient page, such as the version of this site’s contact page from the 1990s that I stumbled onto this morning.

“We’ve got mail!” the old site cheerfully announces, complete with a meaningless header image. The image, like the header and navigation typography, is pixellated to convey “webbiness”—in case you forgot that you were looking at a website in a browser, I guess. “Got mail” is a play on America On-line (kids, ask your parents). “We” is the royal first person plural with which I used to write this site, despite being its sole author. I’d gotten into the habit of “we” from writing copy on entertainment sites for clients like Warner Bros. It made their sites, and mine, seem bigger. It was also an ongoing, self-deprecating joke, although not everyone got it.

As I look at this old page, the copy still feels like me, and it also, if I may say so, anticipates the playful directional body copy of Web 2.0 sites like Flickr by about a decade. (Could be coincidence. Derek Powazek and Heather Champ also wrote jovial instructional copy at the time. Others may have done so as well.)

I’m a lot more ashamed of the design. I’m particularly abashed at:

  • My abysmally stupid effort to straddle the “liquid layout” and “fixed width layout” genres by designing a page that doesn’t work as liquid or fixed. Possibly the only web design ever to put peanut butter and bicycle chains together and call it a sandwich. It should have stayed fixed, and the text and input fields should have matched the width of the illustration and header.
  • Alignment, alignment, alignment.
  • Tiny type with seemingly random hierarchy. In my defense, remember that in those days all type was pixellated. I picked 11px Georgia and 9px Verdana because those sizes looked great in that pixellated world. Still. Feh.

If your old work doesn’t shame you, you’re not growing.

It’s nice to look back and feel that you’ve made progress. When you look at old work, it should suck glaringly and you should cringe painfully. But there should also be some germ within it that you’re not ashamed of—some spark of talent or inspiration that connects to what you do now.

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business content editorial Education ForHire Freelance Happy Cog™ Internship jobs work Working writing Zeldman

Editorial Intern Wanted

Update: The position is now closed. Thanks to all who applied.

We’re looking for one good intern. If you love web design, writing, and publishing, this is the gig for you. You’ll work with Aaron Gustafson, Erin Kissane, Ethan Marcotte, and Jeffrey Zeldman on the new edition of the industry-changing Designing With Web Standards, and possibly another great publishing project as well.

NYC area location is ideal, but not required—what matters most is your commitment and professionalism. Must be willing to work with Microsoft Word, have access to one of the latest versions of it, and be a Word styles ninja. We’re looking for 6–8 hours per week through September or mid-October. The right person will see this as an opportunity to experience the publication process from first draft through galleys and launch, and to learn from industry and community leaders who are funny, smart, and nice.

Apply by e-mail to internquest at happycog dot com. Send a short note selling us on you. All queries will be handled with discretion.

[tags]jobs, internerships, intern, wanted, webstandards, designingwithwebstandards, DWWS3e, 3rdEdition, HappyCog, ErinKissane, AaronGustafson, EthanMarcotte, zeldman, JeffreyZeldman, employment[/tags]

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Applications Brighter Planet bugs business Career Code Community content Design ethics glamorous homeownership parenting work Zeldman

In-Box Twenty

Found in my in-box on this gloriously muggy morning:

  • E-mail from a neighborhood mom interested in hiring our child’s nanny in September, when the girl enters kindergarten. Would our nanny work part-time? (No, she would not.)
  • Invitation to speak.
  • Account status message from American Express, freezing my business account.
  • Personal letter from a co-author of CSS.
  • Correspondence from one half of a feud, demanding that A List Apart delete “libelous” comments made by the other half.
  • QA correspondence on Brighter Planet beta.
  • Photo of kid on general store porch-front rocking horse, sent by ex, from mini-vacation they’re taking together.
  • Responses from speakers selected to present at An Event Apart in 2010.
  • Discussion of “send to friend” links in context of COPPA compliance.
  • Raw personal truth from my dear sponsee.
  • Notes from a developer whose web fonts platform I’m beta testing.
  • Query from a mom whose friend is expecting: what do we pay our nanny? Would she take less? (I hope not.)
  • Basecamp notifications concerning Chapters 7, 9, 2, and 4 of Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition.
  • Invitation from a social media network’s director of strategic relationships.
  • Milestone reminder.
  • Note from my brother about the release of his CD.
  • Case study for review.
  • Notice of Credit Limit Reduction on my personal account from American Express. “In this difficult economic environment, we all need to make choices about how we spend and save.”
  • Discussions of Happy Cog new business activities in various stages of ripeness.
  • Note about a magic berry that will make me look like a princess.

Typical day.

Categories
climate change Code Community Happy Cog™ social networking User Experience UX Web Design Websites work Working Zeldman

Brighter Planet beta

The Happy Cog-designed social network for Brighter Planet is now in public beta. Come on down and kick the tires. Brighter Planet helps you take control of your environmental footprint: measure your climate impact, discover simple ways to reduce it, track your progress, and share your experiences with other people who who want to make a difference.

Happy Cog‘s New York office developed this project. The team:

This truly collaborative project could not have been conceived or completed without the brilliant and generous work of Brighter Planet team members including:

  • CTO Adam Rubin (bio, blog, Twitter)
  • Co-founder and Product Design Director Andy Rossmeissl (Twitter, bio)
  • Senior Systems Engineer Seamus Abshere (bio)
  • Rails developer Rich Sturim (Twitter, bio)

Not only is this young, passionate team dedicated to reducing climate change and all things green, they are also marketing kingpins, shrewd user experience designers, and badass developers.

We love our clients. These folks and this project are dear to us. And it’s a fun way to make a difference. I hope you’ll check out Brighter Planet’s new beta social network.

[tags]brighterplanet, climatechange, beta, site, launch, launches, webdesign, projects, work, happycog[/tags]

Categories
Browsers bugs CSS Design firefox Mozilla Web Design Web Standards work zeldman.com

Firefox test page

Firefox gurus, a page demonstrating the Firefox long content bug has been created for your browser fixing pleasure. Kindly visit the test page using Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.5 for Windows (and possibly also for Linux). The following defects should be evident:

  • At least half the comments should be cut off by the browser.
  • The footer should be cut off by the browser.
  • The form enabling you to add comments may also be cut off by the browser (or it may be incomplete, or the labels for such things as your name and email address may appear in the wrong location).

View the same page in Safari 3+, Opera 9+, or IE7/8, and compare. In the other browsers, all comments are displayed, the footer is displayed, and the content form is viewable and displays correctly. How often does Firefox compare unfavorably with some of these browsers? Hardly ever. Which is precisely why you want to fix it. (That, and you’d like your users to be able to view all the content on a page, not just some of the content.)

The test page is identical to this 2 July post, with comments frozen as of 9 July 2009, and with the site’s original CSS, which revealed the long content bug in Firefox.

A subsequent 8 July post documents the steps I and two other developers took in order to isolate this bug in Firefox, and the CSS workarounds (suggested by two of the site’s readers) which have since been put in place to cover up for this defect in Firefox. The thread also explains what we changed in the CSS to enable Firefox users to read long content on the site.

The CSS cover-up enables Firefox users to read all the content on long pages, but at a cost: there is a flash of red background during slow load times. And, obviously, it’s better to fix Firefox than to create somewhat flawed CSS workarounds that slightly diminish the experience for all users of the site.

Thanks for your help! Let me and this site’s readers know how we can assist you. And remember, please use the test page (not this page or any other page of the site) to isolate the bug in Firefox.

Read more

  • HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
  • Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
  • In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
  • XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009

[tags]firefox, browser, bug, firefox3, firefox3.5, windows, linux, bugs, buggery, debugging, demo, testpage, mozilla[/tags]

Categories
Browsers bugs Design firefox Mozilla Web Design Web Standards work zeldman.com

Firefox forces orange background flash

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 for Windows no longer cut long pages of this site in half, hiding 50% or more of the pages’ content, including the footer, because of a newly discovered bug in Firefox (discovered by this site’s layout).

The bad news is that the price of the “fix” is an annoying flash of reddish-orange background. When you first load a page in any browser, rather than the main content’s off-white background area, you instead see the text against a reddish-orange background, obscuring words (including the drop cap), disrupting user experience, and raising doubts about the professionalism of the site and thus of the opinions it expresses.

With the annoying flash of colored background, everyone who reads this site suffers. But without it, Firefox 3/3.5 cuts long pages in half. Until Firefox fixes the bug, all readers of this site will experience what I’ll label “the Flash of wrongly styled background color.” (Note: although the browser is still broken, the color flash has since been “fixed.” Impatient ones, skip ahead to the 9 July update. Narrative fans, keep reading.)

Here’s the story.

Validators were no help

My 2 July post, XHTML DOA WTF, has thus far received 194 comments. Firefox users told me the thread “died” after comment #44049 in Firefox 3 and 3.5 for Windows. The problem also later surfaced on In Defense of Web Developers, written yesterday morning just prior to my surgery. Let’s stick with the 2 July post, though, which is where we did our Q&A.

W3C and WDG validation services both indicated that there was an error on the page, but neither validator could explain it.

  • The W3C showed a long list of unclosed elements (which in fact were closed), a typical W3C validation error when that validator misidentifies the actual problem. The W3C validator has made this mistake since at least 2001. Whenever I complain to the W3C, I’m told they need volunteers to help them fix the validator. So I more often rely on the WDG validation service.
  • The WDG validator (usefully and apparently correctly) indicated that a single illegal UTF character in a comment it could not show me was causing the dilemma. This validator gave me a line number, but no code output—making the line number useless, and forcing me to go into my database and examine each of 194 comments visually for unsupported character problems.

In search of a single UTF-16 character

I next spent two hours of an insanely busy pre-surgery day unsuccessfully attempting to manually track down UTF errors in comments that no validation service was able to pointpoint. I had to apologize to colleagues and clients to whom I owed work, since the quest to make my personal site legible and usable to Firefox users took precedence over paying work in my sad little mind. (Call it a mark of the high esteem in which I hold Firefox; also call it a concern for readers.)

Automattic’s designer/developer (and my friend) Noel Jackson then took over for me and was eventually able to locate a single UTF error in a Japanese pingback. Or so it seemed.

WordPress, the power behind this site, is supposed to convert illegal UTF-16 to legal UTF-8, and we thought it had done so. Nevertheless, the only validation service to have claimed anything semi-coherent said otherwise. To solve the problem required brute force: we deleted the entire Japanese comment. To the clients and colleagues to whom I owed work I was unable to finish while tracking down a Firefox bug, I now also owed an apology to a Japanese blogger. Personally, I blamed Firefox for ludicrously Draconian error handling, but at least I thought we had “solved” the needless problem raised by such behavior.

Drudge work for nothing

I owe Firefox an apology. Draconian error handling of impossible-to-trace possible UTF errors was not the cause of its failure to display pages correctly. Inability to parse valid CSS on long pages was the actual cause.

Although my page now validated, Firefox still cut it off at the waist. Thanks to this bug, users of Firefox—many of whom care greatly about web standards (it’s one reason so many developers choose Firefox)—were unable to read more than half the comments about XHTML 2 and HTML 5 from their fellow standardistas. They were also unable to post comments or view the footer (thus making them unable to view other content on this site, as well as third-party site highlighted in the footer). This was a win for nobody, except maybe Microsoft, Opera, and Safari. And, like I said, we like Firefox and people who use it. Back to the drawing board.

Seek and ye shall not find

Nikolay Bachiyski, a lead developer at Automattic, then conducted a series of tests:

  1. He established that only Firefox 3.0/3.5 (and only in Windows) cut the valid web page’s content in half.
  2. He verified that the page’s content was valid (UTF-8) as was its markup.
  3. The DOM loaded properly.
  4. There wasn’t an (X)HTML parsing problem.
  5. Disabling JavaScript made no difference.
  6. Disabling CSS enabled all the page’s content to display in Firefox; turning CSS back on cut the page in half again. Clearly, the issue was with CSS.
  7. Nikolay then disabled the lines of Mozilla- and Webkit- oriented CSS3 that generate “warnings” or “errors” in the W3C validation service. But even with those lines disabled and the CSS completely valid, the page’s content failed to display completely in Firefox. The bottom of the page was still cut off.

A CSS “fix” with a drawback

Valid CSS was somehow to “blame” for Firefox’s inability to show a long page without hiding half the content.

You may ask why I didn’t discover this problem during the building and testing of my site’s redesign. You might even ask why my readers didn’t discover it (since I beta tested the redesign at several stages). The answer is simple. I never tested a dummy blog post with nearly 200 comments. It didn’t occur to me that more than 40 comments would be necessary to test whether valid CSS and XHTML would work in good modern browsers, let alone in one as excellent as Firefox.

Michel Bozgounov and Kyle Weems then proposed a simple CSS fix:

div#wrapper {overflow: visible;}

My friend Noel implemented the CSS fix while I was unconscious and having stuff cut out of me.

It works, and I thank all these gentlemen. But it has the unfortunately side-effect of inflicting a flash of reddish-orange background on the page until most or all content has loaded. (I had previously spent over two weeks eliminating that flash of background.) And it does this in all browsers (or nearly all), not just Firefox. To force Firefox to display all content on a page, I have to force every other browser to flash red before it shows content.

Obviously, it’s vital that Firefox users be enabled to read and comment on long or popular posts. But there must be a better way than deforming the CSS. And there is a better way: namely, a Firefox bug fix.

Our friends at WordPress have contacted our friends at Mozilla, so we are hopeful that this will be fast-tracked. Mozilla friends, call on me to help at any time.

9 July Update: 99% solution

With the addition of 1000px of min-height to #wrapper, the reddish-orange flash has been eliminated, at least in pages that load quickly. (On long pages, or with slow connections, the reddish-orange background remains painfully visible until the page finishes loading.) Read more about this CSS adjustment. Note that adding CSS workarounds is not the same thing as fixing browser bugs. (Indeed, CSS workarounds may retard browser development by removing the problem so it never gets fixed.)

A Firefox Test Page

As I am not entirely satisfied with this CSS workaround (despite my gratitude to its authors) and as I do not want Mozilla’s engineering wizards to be unable to fix Firefox because of changes to my CSS, I have posted a Firefox test page using the site’s original (perfectly fine, background-flash-less) CSS, and a page explaining the Firefox test page.—JZ

Read more

  • HTML 5: Nav Ambiguity Resolved. An e-mail from Chairman Hickson resolves an ambiguity in the nav element of HTML 5. What does that mean in English? Glad you asked! — 13 July 2009
  • Web Standards Secret Sauce: Even though Firefox and Opera offered powerfully compelling visions of what could be accomplished with web standards back when IE6 offered a poor experience, Firefox and Opera, not unlike Linux and Mac OS, were platforms for the converted. Thanks largely to the success of the iPhone, Webkit, in the form of Safari, has been a surprising force for good on the web, raising people’s expectations about what a web browser can and should do, and what a web page should look like. — 12 July 2009
  • In Defense of Web Developers: Pushing back against the “XHTML is bullshit, man!” crowd’s using the cessation of XHTML 2.0 activity to condescend to—or even childishly glory in the “folly” of—web developers who build with XHTML 1.0, a stable W3C recommendation for nearly ten years, and one that will continue to work indefinitely. — 7 July 2009
  • XHTML DOA WTF: The web’s future isn’t what the web’s past cracked it up to be. — 2 July 2009

[tags]browser, bugs, Firefox3, Firefox3.5, Firefox/Windows, browsers, firefoxbugs[/tags]

Categories
Design project management work

Design management

Clusterfuck, despite its saucy name, does not refer to a pleasurable group activity. Its origins are military, its antecedents bloody. The Urban Dictionary offers ten pages of definitions. Our favorite is a double entendre on “cluster bomb” and the oak leaf or star cluster insignia worn by incompetent military brass whose bad decisions result in a needless bloodbath—a “clusterfuck.”

Most web design and development projects turn into clusterfucks. The problem is not unique to web-based client services. Advertising projects, graphic design jobs, architecture assignments, filmmaking, and pretty much every other professional creative service usually begins with smart, talented people shaking hands across a table, and ends in finger-pointing and regret—like a Country & Western love song.

Great work cannot emerge from such environments. Not even good work can crawl from that wreckage. If a fine portfolio, a delightful career, and the satisfaction of earning your bread by providing a genuine service are to be had, you must first learn to manage your clients and colleagues.

Managing your way out of a paper bag

Although I teach this skill, I confess I am not nearly as good at it as I should be. The trick to great projects, I have found, is (a.) landing clients with whom you are sympatico, and who understand language, time, and money the same way you do, and (b.) assembling teams you don’t have to manage, because everyone instinctively knows what to do. I have been lucky at those two things, and thus poor at coping when a design job very occasionally lights its own genitals on fire and leaps into a bucket of oil.

For those who have no control over which clients and projects come to them, there is still hope, because everyone on the web (not just professional designers and developers) has the ability to produce meaningful content, and every designer and developer additionally has the power to create products and services. As your own client, working alone, or with a carefully hand-picked team, you can produce great things. If you suck at management, you’ll have problems, but not the kind of problems that create mediocre websites while emptying your company’s bank account and draining all the joy and color out of life.

Producing a well-edited zine or a useful and skillfully designed web application may produce income. It will almost certainly generate job satisfaction. And once it finds the right audience, it should yield more sympathetic clients, resulting in fewer clusterfucks, and a greater ability to get on the phone and straighten out a mess if you still occasionally fumble as a manager.

[tags]business, webdesign, project management[/tags]