MSN, Opera, and Web Standards

Håkon Lie, the father of Style Sheets and CTO of Opera, debunks Microsoft’s claim that web standards have anything to do with the blocking of Opera and Mozilla users from MSN.com. Lie’s eye–opening commentary includes a chart analyzing all 63 top–level pages at MSN.com in terms of standards compliance.

Lie, Hakon. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>Standards

Much Ado About 5K

A full-fledged website under 5K? Some of the brightest people in the industry swore it could not be done. Yet hundreds of developers not only came in under the 5K budget, they built great sites in the process. Zeldman explores how the 5K Awards rocked the web.

Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design

Much Ado About Smart Tags

Microsoft’s proprietary Smart Tags: Boon or bane? Kaminski digs deep beneath the hype and paranoia in an extensive assessment of what Microsoft hath wrought.

Kaminski, Chris. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>Standards

Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box

A project I recently worked on required an elastic layout with two columns of equal height, each with a different background color. As usual, there was no way to tell which column would be taller. I immediately thought of Dan Cederholm's Faux Columns, but I needed an elastic layout. I also looked at the One True Layout, but this seemed buggy and required too much extra markup and too many hacks for my taste.

Pearce, Alan. List Apart, A (2007). Design>Web Design>Document Design>CSS

Naked

Every content producer cowers before twin demons. On one side stands the publisher’s mandate: you must make your deadline. Readers expect it, and readers lose trust if you’re late to market. On the other side stands the editor’s prime directive: you must publish worthwhile material. Readers expect it, and readers lose trust if you publish filler simply because an issue is due. Publish junk once, and you lose a few discerning people. Do it continually, and you lose everybody.

Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Information Design>Web Design

The Narrative Web: Beyond Usability and Design

The point is not that we should add stories to our sites to ensnare narrative-starved readers. The point is that the reader's journey through our site is a narrative experience. Our job is to make the narrative satisfying.

Bernstein, Mark. List Apart, A (2001). Articles>Usability>User Experience>Rhetoric

Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason)

If you don’t know what the website you’re working on is supposed to do, it’s going to be really hard to succeed. Greg Storey offers a simple web strategy development process for everyone. The formation of strategy isn’t one of the most popular aspects of web development, but it should be. Strategy narrows the focus and purpose of a project to make it as effective as possible. Strategy helps contain the scope of work, direct the content creation process, and provide tactical direction to information architects.

Storey, Greg. List Apart, A (2005). Design>Web Design

Night of the Image Map

CSS design from beyond the grave: all the secret ingredients you’ll need to resurrect the image map using CSS and structurally sensible XHTML.

Robertson, Stuart. List Apart, A (2003). Design>Web Design>Interactive>CSS

Nipping Client Silliness in the Bud

A significant number of ALA posts talk about unreasonable requests from clients. Either they want a Sony-level website on an AOL user's look at my kitties budget, or else they want so many features added to their sites that they will become as unusuable as the original boo.com.

Miller, Robin. List Apart, A (2000). Articles>Management>Collaboration

Omniweb and Standards

How does Omniweb fare when it comes to web standards? Earlier versions, while highly praised for an elegant user interface and strong support of international character sets, fell drastically short in CSS and W3C DOM support.

Waferbaby. List Apart, A (2002). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers

One Boy's Life: Surviving the Dot-Com Blitz

A boy, a job, and a dot-com economy. ALA's Nick Finck tells his personal story of hirings and firings on the cusp of the dot-com crisis.

Finck, Nick. List Apart, A (2001). Careers>Web Design

Onion Skinned Drop Shadows

Animators use onion skinning to render a snapshot of motion across time. Now, web designers can use this technique to create the truly extensible CSS-based drop shadow.

Williams, Brian. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS

Paper Prototyping

As interfaces become ever more complex and development schedules seem to get shorter and shorter, you may find it useful to give up your user-interface modeling software for awhile in favor of something simpler. All you need is paper, pens, scissors, and your imagination.

Medero, Shawn. List Apart, A (2007). Design>Information Design>Planning

Patents, Royalties, and Web Standards

We urge all ALA readers to examine the W3C Patent Policy draft, read The Web Standards Project’s opinion of same, and mail your comments to the W3C.

Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2001). Articles>Intellectual Property>Standards

The Perfect 404

Strategies for building a custom 404 page that enhances usability and makes the most of an otherwise lost cause.

Lloyd, Ian. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design

Pocket-Sized Design: Taking Your Website to the Small Screen

Among the many websites that are out there, few are standards-compliant. Among those few, only a handful sport style sheets adjusted to the needs of handheld devices. Of those which do offer styling for handhelds, not all will fit the smallest, lowest-resolution screens without presenting the user with the ultimate handheld horror: namely, horizontal scrolling.

Etemad, Elika and Jorunn D. Newth. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS>PDA

Power to the People

Relentlessly simple solutions to complex design problems can be the difference between an average experience and a great one. D. Keith Robinson reminds web designers and developers that ease of use is more important than technological sophistication.

Robinson, D. Keith. List Apart, A (2005). Design>Web Design>User Centered Design

Power To The People: Relative Font Sizes

Relative font sizes may make websites more accessible — but they’re not much help unless the person using the site can find a way to actually change text size. Return control to your audience using this simple, drop-in solution.

Mihelac, Bojan. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>Typography>CSS

Practical CSS Layout Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

Think you need HTML tables to craft complex liquid layouts? Not so! In this tip-packed tutorial, Mark Newhouse shares advanced yet practical CSS techniques any working web designer can use.

Newhouse, Mark. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS

Prettier Accessible Forms

Forms are a pain. You can make them pretty, make them accessible, or go a little crazy trying to achieve both. Nick Rigby offers a happy solution.

Rigby, Nick. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Forms

A Preview of HTML 5

HTML 4 has been around for nearly a decade now, and publishers seeking new techniques to provide enhanced functionality are being held back by the constraints of the language and browsers.

Hunt, Lachlan. List Apart, A (2007). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Print It Your Way

Because ALA’s readers are web users as well as designers and developers, we offer this tidbit from Derek Featherstone on creating user stylesheets to print articles to your own specifications.

Featherstone, Derek. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS

Print to Preview

Going from the browser to the printer has always been a bit of a guessing game. In this article, Pete McVicar shows us a method for providing users with a reliable print preview.

McVicar, Pete. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS>Printing

Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!

You like microformats? Weï¿ll give you some freakin' microformats. CSS luminaries Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos introduce the boom! microformat and show you how to make book the easy way.

Bos, Bert and Hakon Wium Lie. List Apart, A (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS>Printing

The Problem, the Balloon, and the Four Bedroom House

Without a problem, there is no project. Where there is a problem, however, there is a stakeholder who is desperate for a solution and who has a delivery deadline — which is normally sometime yesterday. Find out how a good process can tame even the most unruly project.

Di Stefano, Joe. List Apart, A (2004). Articles>Project Management>Workflow