The language de amour.
A reminder for people who make websites: if you forget to set your site’s background color, your visitors may set it for you.
In three minutes, I found three sites that forgot this basic rule of web design. Set your browser’s background color to something heinous (I chose magenta) and click around the web. You may be surprised. Don’t forget to check your own site!
[tags]bgcolor, webdesign, color, yahoo!, segura-inc, 800flowers[/tags]
Campaign Monitor has taken me to task, and I find it hard to dispute their primary contention:
To say as a blanket statement that HTML email impedes communication is an extraordinary generalisation. There are many times when a well designed, and well laid out HTML email can be a lot clearer, easier to scan and overall better experience than the equivalent in plain text.
They’re got a point. Having read and considered Campaign Monitor’s comment and other sensible responses to my 8 June post, I agree that my brush was too broad.
A few well-designed, well-considered, communicating visual elements, in the context of a well-written, time-respecting, communicating HTML e-mail message, sent only to people who have asked to receive it, and formatted to work across applications and platforms, can indeed enhance communication.
Yet unsolicited mail, as all internet users know, makes it hard to use e-mail to communicate with friends, family, and work mates. Trying to defeat spam, we miss messages from business partners and loved ones. Add unsolicited graphics and broken formatting to that mix; send tons of it to a business person who is trying to check e-mail while out of the office, and you have a recipe for road rage on the information superhighway.
Perhaps reasonable people could agree to the eight notions put forward below.
Note: As in my previous post, I’m about to preach to the choir. Designers reading my site and using Campaign Monitor or other fine mail services (such as Deck advertiser MailChimp, cough) already know and practice ’most everything I’m about to recommend. The following is not a pledge. Pledges don’t work. People don’t change their behavior or business practices because someone with a blog asks them to be nice. Okay? So this is not directed at my readers or Campaign Monitor’s customers, who, I believe, will agree:
Nokia sent a friend an HTML e-mail message. I’ve broken it into five screen shots, because it won’t fit on one. E-mail, as a medium, really doesn’t want to carry all this freight.
ASCII means never having to say you’re sorry.
[tags]HTML mail, e-mail, marketing, internet marketing, design[/tags]
Tickets are now available for An Event Apart Chicago 2007, August 27–28, at the Chicago Marriott Downtown. It’s two days of web standards, best practices, and creative inspiration with…
Plus your hosts:
On the agenda:
Learn how to use data you didn’t even realize you were collecting, to find out what your users really want. Discover how different forms, fields, and labels make or break interactions. How color, typography, and visual metaphors influence perception of your site and brand. How to make personal projects more successful and daily work-for-hire more fulfilling.
Your Conference Pass includes admission to all sessions at the two-day Chicago conference, snacks and lunch on both days, access to all social events, and a bag of swag. If you register by July 27, it’s yours for $795 ($100 off the standard pricing). Frequent Apartniks (those who’ve attended a previous Event Apart event) save an additional $100. More information is available at aneventapart.com.
[tags]aneventapart, an event apart, chicago, aeachicago07[/tags]
An Event Apart Boston 2007 was the best attended show since Mr Meyer and I founded our design conference scarcely sixteen months ago. Attendees came from as far away as Singapore and India. They hailed from Bulgaria (2), Canada (12), Estonia (1), Finland (2), India (1), Ireland (1), Latvia (1), Singapore (1), Sweden (1), the UK (3), and the US (510).
In all, 546 web artisans descended on Boston for our two-day event. The engagement and commitment of this audience were electric. Rather than waste pixels on my impressions of the show, I submit these third-party posts and artifacts:
[tags]aneventapart, aeaboston07, aeaboston2007[/tags]
…As the cover band upstairs kicks off its fourth set. Good times. The Boston Marriott Copley Place lobby, Saturday March 24, 2007. An Event Apart Boston begins Monday March 26th.
[tags]aneventapart, aneventapartboston, ericmeyer[/tags]
Fresh on the Job Board:
Happy Cog Philadelphia is looking for an experienced freelance front-end (presentation layer) developer with strong design sensibilities. You must live and breathe semantic XHTML and CSS and understand how design and layout decisions manifest themselves in the world of markup. It helps if you’ve worked with Content Management Systems like EllisLab’s ExpressionEngine and can integrate templates within this environment. You must be in the Philadelphia area and be able to work with us on site. Details are available on the Job Board posting.
[tags]happycog, hiring, webdesign, markup, css, expressionengine[/tags]
In Issue 233 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
This issue goes out to our friends at SXSW Interactive.
Edited by Erin Kissane. Produced by Erin Lynch. Tech-edited by Aaron Gustafson and Ethan Marcotte (is that fair?). Illustrated by Kevin Cornell. Art directed by Jason Santa Maria. Published by Happy Cog. It’s shake and bake and I helped.
[tags]webstandards, flash, design, webdesign, alistapart, validation, ethanmarcotte, danmall, danielmall[/tags]
Registration is now open for An Event Apart Boston 2007. Enjoy two amazing days of design and code plus meals, a party, and a bag of swag for a mere $795 (reg. $895) while early bird savings last. Attend for as little as $745 with a discount code exclusively for zeldman.com readers.
On An Event Apart’s website, you’ll now find a detailed schedule describing the presentations with which our superstar speakers hope to entertain and enlighten you. From “Web Standards Stole My Truck!” to “Redesigning Your Way out of a Paper Bag,” it’s two stimulating days of best practices and fresh ideas in design, usability, accessibility, markup and code.
Check out that schedule. I’ll wait.
Lest you be overwhelmed by learning too much too soon, we’ll help you unwind (and do a little networking) at the Opening Night Party sponsored by Media Temple. You might even win a prize, courtesy of Adobe, New Riders, or Media Temple.
Our Boston Events page also includes notes to help you book your hotel room at a specially negotiated discount price.
Located in beautiful and historic Back Bay, the Boston Marriott Copley Place provides in-room, high-speed internet access; laptop safes and coolers; 27-inch color TV with cable movies; luxurious bedding and linens, and more. Best of all, it’s the site of the conference. You can walk out of your room and into the show!
During the early bird period, the price for this two-day event is $795. But you can nab an extra $50 off with this discount code exclusively for zeldman.com readers:
AEAZELD
Just enter AEAZELD in An Event Apart’s shopping cart to enjoy those savings immediately. During our early bird period, you’ll pay just $745 for the two days and everything that comes with them.
After February 26, 2007, when the early bird savings ends, the price goes up to $895, and you’ll pay $845 with the discount. Still pretty good for two days with some of the sharpest minds and greatest talents in web design. But why pay more? Book An Event Apart Boston as soon as you can.
An Event Apart Boston will be the best conference Eric Meyer and I have yet put together. It will also be this year’s only East Coast Event Apart. Don’t miss it.
Join Eric and me, along with Steve Krug, Andrew Kirkpatrick, Molly Holzschlag, Cameron Moll, Dan Cederholm, Ethan Marcotte, and Jason Santa Maria, for what we modestly believe may be the most exciting and enlightening show in modern web design.
Hurry! Seating is limited and early bird savings end Feb. 26, 2007.
[tags]aneventapart, boston, aneventapartboston07[/tags]
Happy Cog starts its publishing year with a great little issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
by Mark Boulton
So you think you know all about whitespace. You may be surprised. Mark Boulton, type expert to the stars, shows how micro and macro whitespace push brands upscale (or down) and enhance legibility in print and online.
by Craig Cook
For designers who find web standards as easy to grasp as a buttered eel, Craig Cook shows how to stop the hurting and turn on the understanding. Learn how web standards work, and why they are more than simply an alternative means of producing a visual design.
[tags]design, typography, whitespace, webdesign, webstandards[/tags]
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web and founder of the W3C, announces reforms:
It is really important to have real developers on the ground involved with the development of HTML. It is also really important to have browser makers intimately involved and committed. And also all the other stakeholders….
Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work.
[tags]W3C, webdirections, accessibility, haslayout, browsers, mcsweeney’s, folkways[/tags]
Partly because the beta was carefully rolled out over many months, the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 has largely been a non-event, for developers as well as journalists. While not at the level of Mozilla Firefox, IE7 is far more standards-compliant than IE6, which was way more compliant than IE5.5, which beat the pants off IE5. To make IE6 render standards-compliant pages correctly, web designers came up with a Wikipedia’s worth of hacks. In IE7, those hacks aren’t necessary; some actually cause problems.
(Here’s a tip from Dan Cederholm, who created the CSS for Happy Cog‘s redesign of Advertising Age: “inline-block is the new-and-improved method for auto-clearing floats.” Use it to replace display: inline-table;.)
IE7 is also the first Microsoft browser to permit user scaling. It does this the same way the Opera browser does it (which is the same way Microsoft Office does it): if text is too small, the user scales the entire page. By contrast, Safari and Firefox use Text Zoom, originally developed by Tantek Çelik for IE5/Mac. In those browsers, if text is too small, the user scales the text size—and nothing but the text size. Images, column widths, and so on, typically do not scale (unless the web designer is doing something really tricky).
There’s a huge difference between Text Zoom and Page Zoom, and it will affect the way designers spec type sizes for the web. It didn’t matter much when only Opera scaled the page. It was a neat feature of Opera; but Opera’s neat feature didn’t affect the way standards- and accessibility-oriented designers approached text size. But market share matters. Once IE7 gains critical mass, a lot of our current thinking about ems and pixels and such will go out the window. I’ll write about that soon, probably on A List Apart.
Meantime, developers are focused on the persnickety stuff: Ajax and JavaScript compatibility problems, CSS bugs that didn’t quite get fixed, and CSS hacks that no longer work.
Like me, you may have heard from a client whose site you designed before IE7 existed. What problems have you encountered? What hacks have you jettisoned, and with what have you replaced them? (Please include URLs.)
[tags]css, IE7, bugs, hacks, workarounds, design, webdesign, tantek, dancederholm[/tags]
Reader Adam Engelsgjerd writes:
I develop and maintain websites for the University of Arizona Library. We make use of the “Holly Hack” to avoid the IE6 peek-a-boo bug for our intranet site (God bless Holly). In the course of testing our sites against IE7 I noticed that the bug was rearing its head again‚ despite claims that this latest version has fixed it.
Further investigation revealed that while IE7 really does seem to have fixed this peek-a-boo bug the Holly Hack has, with decidedly sardonic irony, reintroduced the very problem it was created to circumvent.
This morning I tested and just implemented a fix that seems to work for us: the removal of the universal selector, “*‚” before the “html” selector. So the traditional Holly Hack is:
/* Hides from IE5-mac \*/
* html #contentWrapper {height: 1%;}
/* End hide from IE5-mac */
Our new code is now:
/* Hides from IE5-mac \*/
html #contentWrapper {height: 1%;}
/* End hide from IE5-mac */
I’ve tested this against the following browsers on Windows XP SP2:
IE7
IE6 (SP1 standalone install from evolt.org and SP2 full install)
IE5.5 (standalone install from evolt.org)
Netscape 7.2 and 8.1
Opera 7.11 and 8.54 and 9.00
Firefox 2.0
And on Windows 2000 SP4:
IE6
Hopefully this can be of some use should others be running into this same problem.
[tags]css, browsers, IE7, bugs, hacks, workarounds, holly hack[/tags]
