Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 89
October 19, 2010
A List Apart 2010 Survey For People Who Make Websites
The data that you provide and we analyze is the only significant information about web design as a profession published anywhere, by anyone. Please take the survey for people who make websites.
October 17, 2010
iPad as the new Flash
iPad. Never have so many embraced a great product for exactly the wrong reasons.
Too many designers and publishers see the iPad as an opportunity to do all the wrong things—things they once did in Flash—without the taint of Flash.
In the minds of many, the iPad is like Flash that pays. You can cram traditional publishing content into an overwrought, novelty Flash interface as The New York Times once did with its magazine. You may win a design award but nobody will pay you for that content. Ah, but do the same thing on the iPad instead, and subscribers will pay—maybe not enough to save publishing, but enough to keep the content coming and at least some journalists, editors, and art directors employed.
It's hard to argue with money and jobs, and I wouldn't dream of doing so.
Alas, the early success of a few publications—publications so good they would doubtless survive with or without iPad—is creating a stampede that will not help most magazines and interfaces that will not please most readers.
Everything we've learned in the past decade about preferring open standards to proprietary platforms and user-focused interfaces to masturbatory ones is forgotten as designers and publishers once again scramble to create novelty interfaces no one but them cares about.
While some of this will lead to useful innovation, particularly in the area of gestural interfaces, that same innovation can just as readily be accomplished on websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—and the advantage of creating websites instead of iPad apps is that websites work for everyone, on browsers and devices at all price points. That, after all, is the point of the web. It's the point of web standards and progressive enhancement.
Luke Wroblewski's Touch Gesture Reference Guide gives designers plenty of ammunition to create dynamic user experiences that work on a wide variety of mobile phones and devices (including iPad) while these same sites can use traditional desktop browser effects like hover to offer equally rich experiences on non-touch-enabled browsers. Unless your organization's business model includes turning a profit by hiring redundant, competing teams, "Write once, publish everywhere" makes more economic sense than "Write once, publish to iPad. Write again, publish to Kindle. Write again, publish to some other device."
I'm not against the iPad. I love my iPad. It's great for storing and reading books, for browsing websites, for listening to music and watching films, for editing texts, presentations, and spreadsheets, for displaying family photos, and on and on. It's like all the stuff I love about my Mac plus a great ePub reader slipped into a little glass notebook I play like a Theremin.
I'm not against iPad apps. Twitterific for iPad is by far the best way to use Twitter. After all, Twitter is really an internet service, not a website; Twitter's own site, while leaps ahead of where it used to be, is hardly the most useful or delightful way to access its service. Gowalla for iPad is my constant companion. I dread the idea of traveling without it. And there are plenty of other great iPad apps I love, from Bloom, an "endless music machine" by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers, to Articles, which turns Wikipedia into an elegant reading experience, to Mellotronics for iPad, an uncannily accurate Mellotron simulator packed with 13 authentic voices—"the same production tapes featured on Strawberry Fields Forever" and other classic tracks (not to mention tracks by nouveau retro bands like Eels).
There are apps that need to be apps, demand to be apps, and I admire and learn from them like every other designer who's alive at this moment.
I'm just not sold on what the magazines are doing. Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.
October 14, 2010
HTML5 For Web Designers en Français
A Book Apart is pleased to present HTML5 Pour Les Web Designers. It is of course the French translation of our best-selling first book, Jeremy Keith's HTML5 For Web Designers, courtesy of French publisher Eyrolles.
Kindly comment on Twitter.
October 13, 2010
Paul Ford on The Big Web Show
Paul Ford is our guest on The Big Web Show, taped live before an internet audience at 1:00 PM ET tomorrow, 13 October 2010, on the 5by5 network at live.5by5.tv.
Paul is a freelance writer and computer programmer. He was an editor at Harper's Magazine from 2005–2010, and brought Harper's 159-year, 250,000-page archive to the web in 2007; the system now supports tens of thousands of registered subscribers. More recently he helped the media strategy firm Activate with the launch of Gourmet Live, a re-imagining of Gourmet Magazine for iPad, and co-founded Popsicle Weasel, a small company totally focused on microsites.
He has written for NPR, TheMorningNews.org, XML.com, and the National Information Standards Organization's Information Standards Quarterly, and is the author of the novel Gary Benchley, Rock Star (Penguin/Plume). Paul programs in PHP, Java, and XSLT2.0, but lately is all about Python and Django. His writing has been anthologized in Best Software Writing I (2005) and Best Music Writing 2009. He enjoys both software and music.
He will teach Content Strategy at the School of Visual Arts in New York City starting in 2011. His personal website, started in 1997, is Ftrain.com. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife Mo and the obligatory cats.
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. Join us!
Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!
October 12, 2010
An Event Apart 2011
Registration is now open for all six An Event Apart conferences in 2011. Join us for three days of the latest web standards, best practices, and creative inspiration in…
Seattle – March 28-30
Boston – May 2-4
Atlanta – June 13-15
Minneapolis – August 8-10
Washington, DC – October 24–26
San Francisco – December 12-14
Each two-day An Event Apart conference will be followed by A Day Apart, a one-day workshop dedicated to a special topic. We are pleased to announce our topics and speakers for 2011:
Mobile Web Design with Luke Wroblewski (Seattle – March 30)
HTML5 and CSS3 with Jeremy Keith and Ethan Marcotte (Boston – May 4)
Content Strategy with Kristina Halvorson (Atlanta – June15)
HTML5 and CSS3 with Jeremy Keith and Ethan Marcotte (Minneapolis – August 10)
Accessible Web Design with Derek Featherstone (Washington, DC – October 26)
Mobile Web Design with Luke Wroblewski (San Francisco – December14)
You can register for just A Day Apart, or just An Event Apart, or save over $100 when you attend all three days.
To register, or for more information, visit aneventapart.com.
4th Annual Blue Beanie Day
Join us 30 November 2010 for the Fourth Annual Blue Beanie Day to support web standards. All it takes is a toque and a dream.
Cognition: Behind the Music
Happy Cog president Greg Storey describes the thinking behind our latest little experiment in online publishing and community:
Last week we launched Cognition, a studio blog, that replaced the traditional open-mic text area commenting system with two options: Either post a response via your own Twitter account or link to a post on your own blog.
As the primary instigator, Mr. Storey explains his and the agency's rationale for doing away with traditional comments:
The problem with most comment threads is that they can reach that useless tipping point very quickly. Without having an active moderator to keep up with all of the various threads it's practically impossible to provide any sort of conversational value.
Meanwhile we have also informally noticed a decline in blog usage since the wider adoption of Twitter within our community. … Happy Cog loves blogs. … What if we could help bring some life back into the old network by encouraging people to write blog posts when they have more to say than what can fit into one-hundred-and-forty characters?
Read more and comment if you wish: Airbag: Babylon.
October 8, 2010
Cog blog offloads comments.
The agency launched by a blog finally has a proper one of its own. Happy Cog gently introduces Cognition.
Speaking of experiments, there's our comments section. [W]e've collocated our comments on Twitter. Share a tweet-length response here, and, with your permission, it will go there. If you are moved to respond with more than 140 characters, post the response on your website, and it will show up here.
