#25537
A Fairy, a Low-Fat Bagel, and a Sack of Hammers
One bright, sunny day, the Bad Internet Fairy closed down every company and organization site on the web. But even though all those company and organization sites had closed down, the internet was still ablaze with activity.
Usborne, Nick. List Apart, A (2003). Articles>Web Design>Writing
#20260
When did weblogs stop filtering the web and begin cluttering it instead? Rich Robinson on digital glut and creative solutions.
Robinson, Richard. List Apart, A (2000). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging
#21326
It's a beginning CSS designer's nightmare and a frequently asked question at ALA: Multi-column CSS layouts can run into trouble when one of the columns stops short of its intended length. Here's a simple solution.
Cederholm, Dan. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS
#10563
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) save bandwidth, vastly reducing the size of your files when compared to old-style markup. With Styles, your sites load faster. You work faster, too. Styles shave grueling hours of grunt-work off your design workload: one brief CSS document can style an entire domain; and when it's time to redesign, you can execute site-wide changes in minutes instead of days. Style Sheets bring genuine leading and sophisticated margination to the web, easing our readers' eyestrain while bringing us the control of negative space we take for granted in other media. They offer exciting new possibilities, from absolute positioning, to interactive manipulation of text and images. And they allow us to create sophisticated layouts while doing no harm to the underlying structure of our documents – ensuring that search engines (as well as hand-held devices, web phones, and other futuristic browser morphs) can 'understand' our pages as easily as readers do.
Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2000). Design>Web Design>CSS
#31071
Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
Findability is to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as 'web standards' is to 'table layouts.' In a web whose vastness exceeds comprehension, sites with findable content win. The good news is that everyone on your team can help make your site findable.
Walter, Aarron. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#13502
Fix Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE
Per HTML and XHTML standards, a DOCTYPE (short for “document type declaration”) informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you’re using, and must appear at the very top of every web page. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won’t validate without them.
Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design>Standards>XHTML
#13621
Flash Access: Unclear on the Concept
In Christian theology, it doesn’t matter exactly when you accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour. As long as you do it before you croak and ask forgiveness for your sins, you’re in like Flynn. This, apparently, is the Macromedia philosophy when it comes to accessibility. The company’s flagship product, Flash, is intrinsically inaccessible to anyone who cannot see properly and is very often inaccessible to a deaf or hard-of-hearing person. It’s also completely inaccessible on slow computers or any machine that lacks the Flash plug-in, rendering those viewers more functionally disabled than they actually are.
Clark, Joe. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Accessibility>Multimedia
#20232
Scaling, 2-D style, cycle-free motion, and heavy strokes. They’re not just web design trends any more. Join Olson on a cultural scavenger hunt as he tracks the ways Flash design techniques have crept into other media.
Olson, Ross. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Multimedia>Web Design>Flash
#28708
'How can you best embed Flash content?' It should be a simple question, but is likely to evoke a lot of different opinions and arguments, as each of the many available embedding techniques have their own pros and cons. In this article, I will look into the complexities and subtleties of embedding Flash content and examine the most popular embedding methods to see how good they really are.
van der Sluis, Bobby. List Apart, A (2007). Design>Web Design>Multimedia>Flash
#18426
Flash MX: Clarifying the Concept
The new Flash MX authoring environment and the equally new Flash Player 6 solve a few accessibility problems. Screen reader compatibility is the first Macromedia access milestone. Screen readers—which, by the way, are not called “voice browsers” or “text readers”—are software that reads web pages, and anything else on your computer, out loud. (I’d show you a picture, but apart from a few uninteresting configuration screens, these programs have no overt visible form.)
Clark, Joe. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Multimedia>Web Design>Flash
#13543
Flash MX: Moving Toward Accessible Rich Media
Macromedia released Flash MX in mid-March of 2002, including enhancements to the player and the authoring tool to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. Admittedly, some areas like screen reader access couldn’t possibly get any worse than they were in previous versions of the player: popular screen readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes ignored Flash content completely. Other features, such as the ability to add captions (which has been available since Flash 5), benefit from improvements Macromedia made to the Flash architecture in this release. The changes have also automatically improved access to existing Flash content when viewed in the Flash Player 6, but to maximize Flash accessibility for your users you’ll need to publish content from Flash MX.
Kirkpatrick, Andrew. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Accessibility>Multimedia
#14897
Flash Satay: Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards
I’ve worked with Flash for several years and have always been slightly dissatisfied with the markup needed to embed a movie in web pages. When I recently published a site in XHTML, my dissatisfaction with the markup grew as I realized that it simply wasn’t valid in this context and was bloating my pages to unacceptable levels. A leaner, standards-compliant method of embedding Flash movies was called for.
Mclellan, Drew. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design>Interactive>Flash
#14896
Flexible Layouts with CSS Positioning
This article was prompted by the growing crop of CSS “tips and tricks” articles that have surfaced in the last year or two. Typical of these are the three column design making use of left and right fixed columns hanging on their margins; and the use of @import, instead of JavaScript, to feed appropriate style sheets to differently enabled browsers. These ideas are very cool and their authors should rightly be heaped with praise, but I can’t help feeling we’ve been here before. Remember when you figured out how to make a table of images display without the gap? Or how about when you worked out the browser’s table rendering algorithm and started using “educator” rows to guarantee correct display? Even more sinful, do you remember discovering those “hidden” (non-standard) attributes like marginwidth? As web designers, we are naturally drawn to tricks, gimmicks, and workarounds. We need to keep our attention on what we are trying to achieve in long run.
Falby, Doug. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design>CSS
#26800
Flywheels, Kinetic Energy, and Friction
Whatever the purpose of the sites you work on, their success depends on visitors doing something. We want our visitors to sign up, or buy, or donate, or download, or apply, or post opinions, or pick up the phone and call us. One way or another if we are to judge our sites as being successful, they have to result in some kind of action on the reader's part.
Usborne, Nick. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>User Experience
#10207
"Forgiving" Browsers Considered Harmful
Current browsers are very forgiving; they quietly correct or gloss over many common HTML errors. This makes it easy for people to experience the joy of creating their own web pages with a minimum of frustration—if a page displays correctly, then it's “right.” Unfortunately, by hiding the need for structure that the web will require as it moves towards XHTML and XML, these forgiving browsers have helped create a world of structural HTML illiterates. As long as browsers continue to parse and display HTML that isn't well-formed or valid, we will never learn the right ways, and we will never get to a structural web.
Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>Standards>XHTML
#27548
Constantly stressed out? Not enough hours in the day to get things done? Ryan Carson has a theory: your problem is too much work time, not too little.
Carson, Ryan. List Apart, A (2006). Careers>Workplace>Planning
#25531
The best web interfaces take time – the one asset that seems to be in perpetually short supply. Leading Scandinavian web developer Pär Almqvist presents a time-based perspective on web interfaces and the network economy.
Almqvist, Pär. List Apart, A (2000). Design>Web Design>User Interface
#28908
These days, 'framework' is quite a buzzword in web development. With JavaScript frameworks like the Yahoo User Interface library, jQuery, and Prototype getting a lot of attention and web application frameworks like Rails and Django getting even more, it seems like everyone is using some kind of framework to build their sites. But what exactly is a framework? And are they only useful to programmers, or can we web designers benefit from the concept, as well?
Croft, Jeff. List Apart, A (2007). Design>Web Design>Programming>Collaboration
#25518
From Table Hacks to CSS Layout: A Web Designer's Journey
Redesigning A List Apart using CSS should have been easy. It wasn't. The first problem was understanding how CSS actually works. The second was getting it to work in standards-compliant browsers. A journey of discovery.
Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS
#28350
Gentle Reader, Stay Awhile; I Will Be Faithful
Every opening paragraph is the beginning of a delicate and transient relationship between reader and writer. This relationship begins quietly, usually without much fanfare--and if it's properly initiated, the reader doesn't even know it's happening. Yet the success of this relationship is an important factor in creating an enjoyable, engaging experience for the reader. This is especially true on the web where author credibility can be difficult to establish, and where, increasingly, readers have so many choices that separating the chaff from the wheat can be a daunting process.
Simmons, Amber. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>Writing>Rhetoric
#30101
Get Out from Behind the Curtain
When used at critical points in the design process, group sessions build strong, respectful relationships. Since clients directly experience the design work, you don't need to sell clients on an idea--they were with you the whole time.
Nelson, Sarah B. List Apart, A (2007). Design>Web Design>Collaboration
#20227
As businesses struggle to stay in business, many are short–changing vendors or woefully delaying payment. Zeldman laments the difficulties of getting paid.
Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2002). Careers>Consulting>Web Design
#26801
The start of 2005 saw the rise of a relatively new technology, dubbed 'Ajax' by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In a nutshell, it is the use of the nonstandard XMLHttpRequest() object to communicate with server-side scripts. It can send as well as receive information in a variety of formats, including XML, HTML, and even text files. Ajax’s most appealing characteristic, however, is its 'asynchronous' nature, which means it can do all of this without having to refresh the page. This allows you to update portions of a page based upon user events and provides one of the cornerstones of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) referred to in discussions of 'Web 2.0.'
Gustafson, Aaron. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>DHTML>Ajax
#31211
Getting Started with Ruby on Rails
The “how” of Ruby on Rails: Hivelogic’s Dan Benjamin prepares non-Rails developers, designers, and other creative professionals for their first foray into Rails. Learn what Ruby on Rails is (and isn’t), and where it fits into the spectrum of web development and design. See through the myths surrounding this powerful young platform, and learn how to approach working with it.
Benjamin, Dan. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Server Side Includes>Ruby on Rails
#20238
Global Treaty Could Transform the Web
Mahoney is boiling mad over a proposed global treaty that would turn our worldwide web into a mishmash of regional Intranets, each attending to whatever local regulation allows.
Mahoney, Dennis A. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>International
