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.

My friend, the content strategist Kristina Halvorson, likes to call content “the elephant in the room” of web design. She means it’s the huge problem that no one on the web development team or client side is willing to acknowledge, face squarely, and plan for….

Without discounting the primacy of the content problem, we web design folk have now birthed ourselves a second lumbering mammoth, thanks to our interest in “real fonts on the web“ (the unfortunate name we’ve chosen for the recent practice of serving web-licensed fonts via CSS’s decade-old @font-face declaration—as if Georgia, Verdana, and Times were somehow unreal).…

Put simply, even fonts optimized for web use (which is a whole thing: ask a type designer) will not look good in every browser and OS.

Jeffrey Zeldman, Real Fonts and Rendering: The New Elephant in the Room
22 December, 2009
24 ways: The Advent Calendar for Web Developers

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3319

The third edition of Designing With Web Standards has hit the shelves; excerpts and interviews are hitting digital airwaves everywhere. Among the latest:

• Creative Expert interviews Zeldman and Marcotte about DWWS3e, live, with call-in questions. Very nice. Broadcast 30 October, 2009; podcast published 31 October 2009.
• Author Talk: Jeffrey Zeldman Interview, an audio podcast at Peachpit. “Author and co-founder of The Web Standards Project Jeffrey Zeldman talks to publisher Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel about the 3rd Edition of his book Designing with Web Standards. He also reveals why writers ‘can’t edit themselves.’” Published 11 November 2009.
• The Future of Web Standards is a free sample chapter for your reading pleasure. Published 12 November 2009.
• Jeffrey Zeldman On The Setup, a Waferbaby joint, takes a break from the DWWS3e fever to talk hardware and software. Published 13 November 2009.

Coming soon:

• Video interview with Michael Nolan
• Typography Q&A with Ellen Lupton in Print Magazine
• And more!

Watch for major announcements Monday Tuesday.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2902

John Sundman is looking for your financial support so he can finish writing and publish his new novel, Creation Science, “a technothriller about scary science—like designer DNA, brain hacking & mind control, computer viruses and biological viruses.”

Sundman is the author of three previous novels: Acts of the Apostles, Cheap Complex Devices, and The Pains.

Apostles is a personal favorite of mine: a thriller only a geek could write (Sundman has decades of experience in computer programming), with real characters, frenetic action and suspense, salty dialog, and serious ideas behind the hot cyber action. If Dan Brown read Sundman, he would understand that thrillers about ideas don’t have to be claustrophobic, one-dimensional, and absurd. If he took Sundman to heart, he would write better books, although they would sell fewer copies.

Which brings it back to you. Sundman is a brilliant author who, for political, intellectual, or other reasons shuns mainstream publishing and success. If we are to keep enjoying his works, we need to help him realize them. I was proud to contribute to Designing Obama and equally delighted to do likewise by Creation Science. If you enjoy good writing and modern independent fiction, I urge you to support this book.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?P=2886

1. http://webtrendmap.com/ by IA Inc. is farking amazing and beautiful. Congratulations, @iA.
2. OH: “Type means the letters.”
3. http://www.biggestapple.net/ is an exquisite new blog by a Wodehouse fan and non-designer (but you’d never know).
4. My 5-year-old just spent 10 minutes showing me the correct way to massage her foot. My little girl is becoming a woman.
5. HTML5 Super Friends declaration of support: http://www.zeldman.com/superfriends/
6. In the park with the kid and friends, watching the sunlit hours melt away. It is the mellow end of summer and our bodies know it.
7. http://bit.ly/InfXh Installing Snow Leopard: What you need to know. Fewer options make for simpler installation.
8. The difference between marriage and divorce is, in divorce, the person who’ll never have sex with you again has her own apartment.
9. “HTML 5 and me” by Jeremy Keith: http://bit.ly/sOqt7
10. Dreamed about Mackenzie Phillips and woke up with a $500 a day habit.
11. RT @leeclowsbeard Every client wants something new. And three examples of where it’s worked before. (via @Coudal)
12. #twitterwit is now in bookstores. It’s an honor to have my work appear in the same volume as real writers like Ashton Kucher.
13. Laura Dern’s hair is the scariest thing in Blue Velvet.
14. @sourjayne At a certain level, you don’t write a resume, you write a paragraph.
15. @sourjayne A multi-page resume suggests you’re narcissistic or inexperienced. These are not desired qualities in an employee.
16. @sourjayne A 1-page resume shows you’re aware the person reading it has no time to waste — proving you’re experienced + have people skills.
17. Actually, Barnes & Noble, I think I’ll save *100%* on Dan Brown’s follow-up to The Da Vinci Code.

Have another?

ShortURL: zeldman.com/?p=2554

Refer to the previous post on Kindle. Two salient points, omitted from the previous discussion and verified this morning, are worth mentioning:

• The Kindle edition of Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Edition, is free of conversion errors, to the best of our knowledge. As an author who hopes to sell copies of his work, I should have pointed that out in my initial post.
• Kindle for iPhone can sometimes create the appearance that a Kindle edition is missing content. Before contacting the publisher to report an error, try switching to the smallest available font size and then re-viewing the page that appeared to be missing some content. Asides, in particular, suffer from this problem, in which text is present but exceeds the viewport, and there is no scrolling mechanism or indication that additional content exists.

ShortURL: zeldman.com/x/59

The process by which books are converted to Kindle format introduces errors which do not get corrected. Every publisher knows this, though none will say so on record.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with Kindle or its format. The problem is one of economics. The cost of a printed book covers some degree of proofing and checking—not enough, but some. The cost of a Kindle book does not support editorial quality control, and the multi-step conversion process, handled in bulk by third parties, chops out content and creates other errors that no one fixes because no one is there to do QA.

I love the idea of Kindle. I love Kindle on my iPhone. As the economics of publishing continues to change, perhaps one day soon, a Kindle edition will contain the same text as the printed book. Until it does, Kindle is great for light reading. But if it’s critical that every word, comma, and code sample come through intact, for now, you’re better off with print.

Update

Two salient points I should have made in this post are covered in Kindling II, posted 27 August 2009.

ShortURL: zeldman.com/x/58

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

In writing four books and an unknown quantity of articles and blog posts, I’ve discovered the simple secret to maintaining quality. I share it with you here in mnemonic nursery rhyme fashion:

Write when inspired; rest when tired.

Whether the task is writing, design, or hanging a picture straight, it is obvious that we do our best work when healthy, rested, refreshed, alert, and eager to do the job for its own sake.

But anyone who has done professional work also knows that we must often work late into the night at the behest of deadlines. There are jobs that call for us to push ourselves, not merely creatively (which is exhilarating), but physically—even when our bodies need rest, our minds are dimmed, our concentration dented, and our inspiration nonexistent.

Therein lies our conflict, and one key to the difference between good and great.

Design is a hurting thing

Work is work, and we must do what we must do. But when quality matters most, the old saw about “good or fast—choose one,” holds true. Pushing through to the finish line when you have nothing left inside you is great for marathon runners, but not so hot for creative professionals. In particular, if you’re trying to write clearly and well, it’s better to let a deadline slide by a day than to “just finish up.”

I call out writing in particular because if you push out a design when you’re exhausted, the details and balance will suffer, and it won’t be as great as it can be—but the public has such a low expectation of aesthetics in web design that you might get away with it. Only you and a few of your designer friends will recognize the sloppy, ill-considered bits that make your work good when it could have been great. Of course, your designer friends will think less of you, and you’ll cringe every time you see the site, but if you don’t have a taste for masochism, you shouldn’t be in design, because the hurt will kill you.

Night of the living deadlines

There’s a reason they call them deadlines.

With design that could have been great but was ever so slightly bungled due to exhaustion in the face of ridiculous deadlines, it is only the designer and the rare armchair aesthetician who know.

But when writers push themselves to make a deadline, everyone knows, because the passages where they cheated are unclear, unpersuasive, ineffective. A reader needn’t follow the exact art and subtle science of kerning or vertical grid building to recognize when a sentence isn’t clear, or fails to make a convincing point, or doesn’t seem to entirely belong with its older and younger brother sentences.

When I let a publisher’s deadline push out a piece of writing before it is ready, it is like thrusting a helpless preemie into the cruel world. And it’s not just external deadlines that can wreck my work. Say I’m writing here, where there are no deadlines. I get nearly to the end of what I want to say, and then I’m called away by work or family. When I return to the blog post hours later to wrap things up and publish, I’m distracted, and the powerful emotion and single idea that initially led me me to write has flown over the garden wall. If I just bang out a finish, the whole piece will be weakened. I know because I’ve done it.

Will no one think of the readers?

Currently I’m working on the third edition of Designing With Web Standards, and in addition to mentally approaching it as a new book in order to truly rethink and reinvigorate it, I’m also sticking like epoxy to the discipline of holding back chapters until they are ready. This sounds like what a writer would always do, but trade publishing is like a slave galley in a Roman galleon—if the sufferer beside you collapses under the whip, you need to row harder. You won’t get that placement at Borders if you don’t finish on time. Amazon won’t give you that special promotional push if you don’t turn it in six weeks earlier than your contract says you must, &c.

Never mind the bollocks. You are not writing for Amazon, or to fit a staff proofreader’s vacation schedule, as important and real as those considerations may be. You are writing for readers, a duty as sacred, in its way, as parenting. If you don’t believe the previous sentence, if you think writing is mainly about getting paid, I’m sorry you wasted your time reading this page, and I hope you find another way to earn a living soon. The world is already choking on half-considered, squeezed-out shit. There’s no need to add to the pile.

If you want to be great, or at least to be better, start by breathing, taking breaks, and working intensely when the mood is on.

Tags: writing, inspiration

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

Rated Five Stars at Amazon.com since the day it was published, “Taking Your Talent to the Web” is now a free downloadable book from zeldman.com:

• Download the front cover! (TIFF image, 1.8 MB)
• Download the book! (PDF, book galley, 9.5 MB)

I wrote this book in 2001 for print designers whose clients want websites, print art directors who’d like to move into full–time web and interaction design, homepage creators who are ready to turn pro, and professionals who seek to deepen their web skills and understanding.

Here we are in 2009, and print designers and art directors are scrambling to move into web and interaction design.

The dot-com crash killed this book. Now it lives again. While browser references and modem speeds may reek of 2001, much of the advice about transitioning to the web still holds true.

It’s yours. Enjoy.

Update – now with bookmarks

Attention, K-Mart shoppers. The PDF now includes proper Acrobat bookmarks, courtesy of Robert Black. Thanks, Robert!

Tags: design, webdesign, TYTTTW, takingyourtalenttotheweb, zeldman, jeffreyzeldman, book, instruction, artdirection, printtoweb

Sorry I haven’t written much here, lately, but I’ve been working on the third edition of a book you may know.

Questions?

Tags: dwws, designingwithwebstandards, 3rdedition, 3e, DWWS3e, newriders, peachpit, zeldman

Now in the coveted 23 December spot at 24 ways: Recession Tips for Web Designers:

Jeffrey Zeldman rounds off our 2008 season with some hard-earned advice for web designers and developers to take into 2009. As the economic climate gets tougher and budgets get cut, our skills need to extend to staying in work, not just completing work won.

Tags: recession, webdesign, business, survival

In Issue No. 274 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: a website without a content strategy is like a speeding vehicle without a driver. Learn why content matters and how to do it right.

Content-tious Strategy

by JEFFREY MACINTYRE

Every website faces two key questions: 1. What content do we have at hand? 2. What content should we produce? Answering those questions is the domain of the content strategist. Alas, real content strategy gets as little respect today as information architecture did in 1995. MacIntyre defines the roles, tools, and value of this emerging user experience specialist.

The Discipline of Content Strategy

by KRISTINA HALVORSON

It’s time to stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. If content strategy is all that stands between us and the next fix-it-later copy draft or beautifully polished but meaningless site launch, it’s time to take up the torch—time to make content matter. Halvorson tells how to understand, learn, practice, and plan for content strategy.

And, in EDITOR’S CHOICE, from July 31, 2007:

Better Writing Through Design

by BRONWYN JONES

How is it that the very foundation of the web, written text, has taken a strategic back seat to design? Bronwyn Jones argues that great web design is not possible without the design of words.

Tags: contentstrategy, content, strategy, content strategy, web, webcontent, webdesign, userexperience, writing, editorial, Kristina Halvorson, Jeffrey Macintyre, Bronwyn Jones, alistapart

Almost everyone I know who is serious about the internet and has spent more than a few years working on web stuff has read John R. Sundman’s novel, Acts of the Apostles, your everyday story of bioengineering, Gulf War Syndrome, Trojan Horses, and millennium cultists. (If you haven’t yet read this classic underground thriller cum paranoid fantasy, do yourself a favor; it’s pretty great.)

Now Sundman has come out with a new book, The Pains, with illustrations by Cheeseburger Brown. Sundman’s third novel owes its genesis to a single sentence written in his online diary: “I woke up this morning with a pain in my body that felt like it might be a soul gone bad.” Through a process that makes sense to writers, that sentence turned into this book:

The Pains is a story of faith in a world that appears to be falling apart. It tells the story of Norman Lux, a 24-year-old novitiate in a religious order, who becomes afflicted with something akin to stigmata.

The complete text and illustrations are on wetmachine.com, freely available for download under a creative commons license. Sundman is now taking orders for the soon-to-be-printed book. You can order by PayPal/credit card or by check.

Tags: sundman, johnsundman, thepains, actsoftheapostles, cheapcomplexdevices, publishing, writing