JeffCroft.com

The wonderful Paul Boag from Headscape interviewed me for the latest episode of Boagworld, almost certainly the best web design podcast on the planet. We talk about my “controversial” views on web standards, Blueprint CSS, and more.

Unfortunately, I hate my voice, and it sounds even worse when propped up against Paul’s sexy British accent. Oh well — I think ...

In my experience, most in-house web teams basically employ two types of people: designers and developers. Sure, some people call them different things, and there are definitely exceptions, but generally speaking, we’re split into these two camps.

For the most part, our technical responsibilities are split up as such: “designers” do the client-side things (HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, etc ...

In the past couple weeks, I’ve received a few e-mails from folks wondering why my blog has been less active than in the past. The answer is pretty simple: I’ve been busy, and I haven’t had much time to write.

However, I wanted to take a moment to point out that I post links almost every single ...

It’s no secret that I love to talk. If you don’t believe me, just ask my friends.

In particular, I like talking about the aspects of our industry I’m passionate about in front of engaged audiences. Last year, I spoke at some of web design’s biggest events, including South By Southwest Interactive, Future of Web Design ...

Wow, it’s hard to believe South By Southwest Interactive, the annual geek-fest for interactive professionals in Austin, TX, is only a few days away. We at Blue Flavor are all excited for another year of great sessions, great networking, and great fun. Keith and Nick will be speaking, and the entire Blue Flavor crew will be in attendance.

The ...

Your markup validator, whether it’s the one on the W3C site or one built into your favorite coding tool, is a debugging tool. It should be used as such. Its job is to find errors in your code, so that you can fix them (or at least be aware of them).

Your markup validator, whether it’s the one ...

Last night, when I finished up the latest redesign of JeffCroft.com, I was tired of being on the computer and didn’t feel like writing much more than a somewhat-flippant “here it is” message. Today, after a good night’s sleep and reading 50+ comments in response to the new design, I’m prepared to talk a little more ...

Yes, it’s a pretty drastic change for me. Yes, it only really works correcty in Safari (get over it). Yes, I did it pretty quickly. Yes, this redesign also constitutes an entire rewrite of my Django-based CMS. Yes, it no longer starts with www2. Yes, there are parts that are still unfinished. Yes, it's a bit of an ...

Today, I finally got around to reading the brouhaha over IE 8 and it’s version-targeting system. The last blog entry I read was Jeffrey Zeldman’s In defense of version targeting , a response to Jeremy Keith’s Broken — and I started to write a lengthy comment. At some point, I realized the comment would make a better post here ...

“Solutioneering” is a term our Creative Director, D. Keith Robinson, came up with back in the early days of Blue Flavor. Essentially, it means putting solutions before problems. In technical fields like web design and development, solutioneering is especially prevalent. However, this approach rarely yields good results.

The past couple of years, I’ve posted a sort of year-in-review entry here at JeffCroft.com in late December or early January. I was getting set to do that again, and I decided I might rather look forward than back — at least for tonight. I may still write that year-in-review post, but right now, I feel more like making ...

As regular readers have no doubt noticed, I am a listing partner for Cameron Moll’s terrific Authentic Jobs. In the interest of transparency, that means I put AJ job listings on this site, and also sit on a sort of board of advisors for Authentic Jobs, in exchange for a small cut of the profit.

For anyone who doesn ...

The kind folks at CoffeeCup Software have posted audio of all the Webmaster Jam Session talks from this past September, including my talk on web typography, and the Web Design Roundtable, on which I participated. The audio comes in the form of a podcast you can subscribe to in iTunes or your favorite podcast application.

I was pretty proud of ...

Alex Russell, proprietor of the Dojo JavaScript library, has written a provocative new piece that is so incredibly spot-on, it’s scary. It’s an absolute must-read for any web standards oriented designer. I just wanted the time to highlight a few choice quotes from Alex’s The W3C Cannot Save Us.

Today, as I was looking through the referrers for this site, I found a comment from my now-co-worker D. Keith Robinson, dated December 4th, 2003. A few excerpts from the comment:

It’s an age old debate. Flash vs. HTML vs. CSS — blah, blah, blah. I’ll hammer a few more nails into this dead horse if it’ll help ...

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that a simple discussion about CSS frameworks has turned into quite a bit of a mess. This is in large part due to inadequacies in the way I presented my thoughts, and also in some part due to what can only be called hypersensitivity, snobbery, elitism, and flat-out ignorance on the part ...

Wow. Less than 24 hours after my last post, there have been nearly 100 comments posted, and I’ve seemingly managed to piss off half the Internet. It seems some people took major offense to my thoughts, although no one has came forward to told me why (Andy Budd said on Twitter, “you’ve managed to tick off quite a ...

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been bombarded (in e-mail, in person, and over IM) with questions about CSS frameworks. I guess I wrote the book on this topic (and contributed, if inadvertently, to one of the most notable CSS frameworks out there), so it’s completely understandable people would come to me with these questions. The question almost ...

I’ve been neglecting this blog over the past couple of week, so I thought I’d make a quick post to update everyone on some goings-on. I spoke at Refresh Seattle a couple weeks ago, then attended Future of Web Design in New York City last week, and have been catching up on e-mail, work, and home life ever ...

If you read this blog regularly, you’ll remember that I had some thoughts on The New Layers of Web Development in a recent entry. Basically, I talked about how the full stack (from web server to server-side programming to client-side rendering) of a modern web apps works together, and how it may disrupt the traditional Web Standards advocate’s ...

During the design roundtable at Webmaster Jam Session last weekend, I mentioned that I think employers often value knowledge of tools too much when it comes to hiring web designers. As I think about it more, I realize that it’s not just employers; there are probably thousands of people out there that call themselves “web designers” despite having no ...

Consider this post a feeler of sorts. There’s a topic I find interesting, but I can’t say I’ve yet fully fleshed out my thoughts on the matter. I’m hoping to generate some discussion here. If other people are also interested, and if a discussion leads me to the train of thought I think it will, then ...

I spent the weekend in The Big D, attending and participating in Webmaster Jam Session 2007, the second annual conference put on by the great guy at CoffeeCup Software. How was it? Really, really great. Possibly the best web conference I’ve been to (Future of Web Design London 2007 is the only one that compares). The sessions were all ...

A couple weeks ago, I posted an entry with the (admittedly sensationalist) title The myth of content and presentation separation. The point of the post was this: Come redesign time, anything other than very minor changes will almost always require changing the markup as well as the CSS. Therefore, fretting over things like the non-semantic class names the Blueprint framework ...

Following Keith’s lead, I saw fit to drop a short post letting you all know about a handful of upcoming speaking engagements I’ll be participating in and events I’ll be attending. I hope to see many familiar faces and meet some new ones!

The W3C acts, essentially, as the organization which creates the tools I work with to do my job as a web designer. They create the specifications I’m supposed to code to, determine the direction future versions of these specs will take, decide what issues are important to address, and generally tell me how to do my job.

But there ...

One of the hallmark attributes of web standards-based design is the concept that proper use of semantic (X)HTML and CSS completely abstracts the presentation of a site from its content. One key real-world benefit of this separation is that come redesign time, one only needs to change or replace the CSS stylesheet, and needn’t lay so much as ...

Barring any (more) unforeseen changes to our schedule, Michelle and I should be nearing Sioux Falls, SD this time tomorrow. We’re hoping in the car tomorrow evening and heading off to the great Northwest. We were supposed to leave on Friday — but our movers called today saying they’ll be here early. Thus, we also need to leave early ...

The official, touted-by-Apple SDK for creating iPhone apps uses web-oriented languages like (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since Apple made this SDK public, some developers (including my employer) have jumped on board, creating iPhone apps that live at public URLs. Other have denounced this practice, suggesting that apps should not be targeted at one device, but rather be equally accessible ...

For the past five weeks or so, your friends at Blue Flavor have been hard at work on a set of web app targeted at iPhone users. These small apps, which we call Leaflets, cover most of the things you like to do online: read feeds, check your comments and friends photos at Flickr, view you and your friends’ events ...