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Someone called Mike gets it. Except he doesn’t.
Someone going by the name “Mike” responded to my recent post Web Standards Killed the HTML Star, but he did so on Jeffrey Zeldman’s follow up post. It was an amusing comment, because he simultaneously laughed at me for being so wrong and perfectly made my point for me. He said:
MoreAn interesting read. However, I completely and utterly disagree. When you say “80% of what made us useful was the way we knew all the quirks and intricacies of the browsers. Guess what? Those are all gone. And if they’re not, they will be in the very near future.” I laughed heartily to myself. 80% of the time I take to complete a web project is usually taken up with browser testing — with older versions of IE being the main culprits.
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Zeldman on Web Standards and the HTML/CSS “guru”
Jeffrey Zeldman, he who is generally seen as the man behind the Web Standards Movement, took the time to reply to my post from earlier in the week, titled Web Standards Killed the HTML Star, in his own piece, It’s 2014. Is Web Design Dead?. He generally agrees with me, most notably in these two quotes:
HTML “gurudom” was never a career path for anyone, aside, maybe, from a couple of talented authors. Same thing with CSS wizardry. Doing black magic with CSS3 can get you a slot on a web design conference stage, but it’s not a career path or proper goal for most web designers.
And, even more to my point:
MoreThe goal of the web standards movement was to remove needless complexity and absurdity from the process of creating websites so we could focus our attention where it should be: on design, content, and experience.
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Web Standards Killed the HTML Star
When Zeldman wrote our bible, we were there, pounding the table in board rooms for using CSS instead of tables for layout, for image replacement techniques that retained the accessibility of the content, for semantic code, and all the rest.
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Some initial thoughts on the iOS 7 redesign
It’s been over a year since I’ve blogged, but today’s introduction of iOS 7 was enough to get me to do it. This isn;t a well-thought out piece, it’s just a bunch of observations and thoughts from the product’s announcement to my installation of the developer beta, and through about 30 minutes of toying around with it. For the most part, my comments are purely about the new design language, and not so much about new functionality (most of the new stuff from a functionality standpoint seems good, at a glance).
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This is mostly a test of some API integration I'm working on.
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Taken at Portland, Oregon in Portland, OR. -
Get yer back up off tha wall!
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Beautiful day in Seattle!
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Sharpee!
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RIP MCA
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Macklemore and Ryan Lewis!
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Not even a Thrift Shop has an excuse for selling these.
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I am here and you are not. Unless you are.
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View from my balcony, right now
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Ciroc with a twist. Vermouth is overrated.
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Because you can never really have too much crab.
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OMG GUYS I just got a photo of the Loch Ness Monster! And she's kind of hot!
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Now THAT is a roll.
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Soccer still sucks, but this stadium is incredible.
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Blue Angels from my balcony, 2012 and 2012…
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The now.
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West Seattle Water Taxi
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Boats lined up all over Lake Union, awaiting the Seattle fireworks show. We'll be watching from this angle (off our balcony).
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Sublime Text 2 Love
A bunch of nice tips and tricks for SB2
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Current status…
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Fluid Type, by Trent Walton
Lots of good tips from Trent on how to deal with type in responsive fluid layouts.
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HOLY SHIT. FROM THE GRAVE!
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Current status: FSM!
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How this site is built
I get a fair number of questions about how this site is built, especially with regard to the content filters and the location-based views. I just answered an e-mail along these lines and it got me thinking maybe I should just document it here, for posterity’s sake.
JeffCroft.com is built in Python, using Django. It runs on a typical stack, where Apache/mod_wsgi acts as the app server, nginx is the proxy serving static content, memcached makes things faster, and MySQL handles the database. But that’s not very interesting. What seems to be of interest is more how the content is managed conceptually. So, here goes:
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From our balcony right now.
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From our window right now.
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Discontent, by Jeffrey Zeldman
Jeffrey outlines many of the issues we face as web designers today. Much of Jeffrey’s work is focused around “content” and publishing — that is to say, sites which provide text passages for reading — and from that standpoint, i agree with everything he has to say, here. Really smart stuff. If you, like me, tend to be more focused on the application side of things than the publishing side, it may not apply as cleanly, but its still worth a read.
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The new Adobe CS6 branding
Facinating look at the branding and identiy work behind Adobe’s new Creative Suite.
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The Great Discontent: Dan Cederholm
Great interview with one of the people I respect most in this industry. Beautiful site, too.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a product designer in Seattle, WA. I recently worked at Simply Measured, and previously co-founded Lendle.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
I’m currently accepting contract work and considering full-time opportunities.
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