Jarrett House North

You might notice something different today...

Today is CSS Naked Day 2007, a day when some thousand-plus web sites have cast off their styling to illustrate their semantically-beautiful bones beneath.

Which is why my site looks, um, weird. All the normal styling has been stripped out.

We do this to illustrate that the Web ain’t all pretty colors; at its root, it’s about markup that is easy to read and portable across multiple devices. It’s all about separating style from content, baby.

Hat tip to Zalm, who turned me on to this concept, and whose markup is just fine.

Georgian revival

International Herald Tribune: Quirky serifs aside, Georgia fonts win on Web. The thesis of the article is that, because of its use in some fairly high profile redesigns (the New York Times website among others), the font Georgia is undergoing a comeback. A slim thread on which to hang an article, particularly when you consider that Georgia has been the font of this blog since at least its redesign in January 2004 (the original custom CSS design used Verdana or Helvetica, depending on availability, as my old stylesheet reveals).

It is sad, as Dave Shea at Mezzoblue notes, that there is practically speaking only a pool of eight or nine fonts through which we can rotate for web typography. In this vein, I have to go back and give Hakon Lie partial credit for at least trying to move the ball forward on web typography, as wrongheaded as he was about the business model implications of what he proposed.

DRM or Free'n'Ugly: why Hakon Lie is wrong about web fonts

As I keep forgetting to prove by posting some old work, I was once an ardent amateur typographer before the web rendered that pastime, as well as most desktop publishing, all but obsolete. As someone who used to code my favorite font family into my stylesheets on the off chance that someone would have Minion installed on their machine, I should be right in the target market for Opera CTO Hakon Lie’s write-up on improving web typography.

And yet, I find myself with some misgivings. Not because there aren’t problems with web typography. To cite one example, several sites that I visit from my home browser used to appear strange to the point of being unreadable because Safari read the type family and found the nearest match—but as you can see, Myriad Wild is no substitute for Adobe’s elegant Myriad sans serif, and when the browser identifies the music-font variant of Minion as the right text in which to set a page of text it’s time to give up.

But the biggest problem with fonts online for me is the same as the biggest problem offline: quality and readability. And for this cause I think Hakon’s suggestion that free fonts should be accessible by browsers to render web pages is not the best idea. The best example I can think of is the one Hakon used: Goodfish. I may be a font snob, but I can’t help but think a web page set in this font would drive me to turn off font downloading—or stop visiting the page. It’s not a bad font, it’s just not a good font for setting text. In fact, it was the general unavailability of good fonts for reading text on screen that drove Microsoft to commission Verdana, Georgia and the other fonts in their Web type set in the first place. Display faces are a dime a dozen, and I happily use freely available ones where necessary—but good fonts for setting text are worth their weight in gold, and the odds of them being released for free use without some sort of DRM are minimal. (That I can name only two exceptions, the highly useful Gentium and Bitstream’s Vera, proves the rule.)

And speaking of DRM and free, there are two unattractive possibilities that would come from the institution of standards for downloading Web fonts. First, there is a long history of ripping off and undercompensating font designers (think of all those collections of 1001 free fonts that consist entirely of cheap knock offs of gold standard fonts that cost money) that can only get worse if the pressure to provide free fonts for Web use grows. I think that a flood of even more cheap knock-off fonts falls in the category of really bad unintended consequences. At the same time, the last thing I want to see is an even more restrictive set of DRM schemes around font technologies. And think of the challenges of enforcing “web only” font licenses through DRM when more and more of the user’s desktop applications are migrating to the Web.

I also think the point that is made on Big Patterns about the difference between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech fonts is well made. But at the end of the day what I want is good fonts that can be used online without resorting to PDF, Flash, or various CSS image replacement techniques—and without paying an ASCAP-style yearly license for the right to do so. I don’t see this happening under Hakon’s suggestion without some extremely creative thinking on the part of the font foundries and software engineers.

The elements of (online) Typographic Style

I’ve meant to blog The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web for quite a while but now (thanks to a sick day while I fight off the remnants of this cold) am finally getting around to it. The site is just what it says, a work in progress that takes each of the lessons of good typography in Robert Bringhurst’s classic Elements of Typographic Style and shows how to address them online. Some fairly advanced topics like kerning with CSS are covered, and the whole thing is pretty darned cool—and a beautiful site, as you would expect.

Redesigns 2: CNet's News.com: ho-hum design, good blogs

The second notable redesign today is at News.com. Reviewing this design is a little more difficult, because it’s harder to spot what has changed. The yellow is still there, now actually looking a little orange. The front page is still a total mess, and it’s still impossible to find an individual headline there. The URLs are still impossibly long and impossible to remember.

But there are three killer features. The treemap view of the hottest stories on News.com is brilliant, as is its placement as a sidebar on every story. It’s interesting to watch popularity change in real time, too, as the current hottest story (Network feud leads to Net blackout) gets hotter. I hope that CNet thought about the effect that this treemap has on their most viewed statistics, or they might just be getting into a self reinforcing loop here.

The Big Picture is even cooler, at least at first. This moving relationship map between stories is fun to use to explore the Related Stories that CNet has long featured at the bottom of every article. Two things are keeping me from being hyper-enthusiastic about the feature, though. I don’t always understand why the connections are drawn the way they are, or what popularity has to do with the relationship between the stories. Second, like all such spider graphs, the relationships are really hard to read once too many of them appear on screen.

The third feature has the potential to be the most controversial among bloggers. That’s because it’s yet another Top 100 list of blogs that are “worth reading.” The results are interesting, especially the Blog 100 Stream (recent posts from all 100 blogs in river of news format). Even if Fark.com is flooding that river right now. I’d like to see more interactivity though. Agree or disagree? What would have been cool would be if CNet partnered with Bloglines or Kinja to allow readers to build their own lists, not just talk about them.

Final note: I wholeheartedly approve of News.com’s shift in focus from Tech News First to News of Change. In 2005, focusing on technology means focusing on law, politics, and the sciences as well.

In fact, the only obviously dumb move I see from this redesign is the My News feature. I’m not going to take the time to customize my view of News.com, folks. I’m putting that time into my RSS reader instead, because the payback is better.

Overall score: Intentions A, execution B+. Great features, but the basic page design, particularly on the home page, could still improve to make finding information easier.

Redesigns Part 1: Salon misses an opportunity

Two big sites unveiled new designs today. Salon (as pointed to by BoingBoing) and CNET’s News.com both rolled out new user interfaces. I’m a little mixed on the design effectiveness of both, but there are a few interesting corners in the mix too. I’ll write a quick post on CNET but want to focus on Salon’s moves now, because frankly they annoy me more.

First the graphic identity. It’s cleaner, but some of the elements, particularly on the front page, appear unanchored and somehow floating—as though the former black boxes of the design were containing the content and it’s now just kind of drifting around the page. There’s not a good sense of an underlying grid. Take a look at the community sidebar for an example—it seems to bear little relation to what’s going on around it. I’m also getting lost in the headlines on the left—too much bold text, not enough visual separation or something. It’s hard to scan. Finally, the new design and branding doesn’t carry through to all the content, particularly Audiofile. Visual design: A for intentions, B- for execution.

I also don’t appreciate the “ghetto-ization” of Salon’s blogs, which are now (especially Audiofile and War Room) the major daily draw for me. While they’ve moved into the main column and feature updated headlines, they’re only small text links in a mass of illustrated spots and thus easy to overlook. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Salon’s other articles. I still click through on the RSS feed for some other articles, such as today’s Fall of the Rovean Empire by Sidney Blumenthal and last week’s article on the implications of the Vatican’s crackdown on homosexuality in seminaries. But for me Salon’s steady, unglamorous RSS feed (OK, it’s actually RDF) is much better at making their content findable than the redesign. And the link to the RSS feed is now gone from the front page! It’s not even in the meta tags, so you can’t use autodiscovery. This is brain dead. Discoverability: intentions A, execution D.

Finally, functionality. I like the addition of the font size controls and the print and email links. But they aren’t on pages that don’t have the new design. Intention B+ (page tools are ok but not revolutionary, really. How about telling us about your most emailed articles with those stats you’re collecting through Hotbox?) and execution A-.

Overall score: intentions A, execution C-. Not a good way to start your next ten years, folks.

CSS bonanza

A trifecta of interesting CSS links in my aggregator this morning. First, Luke Melia points to an interesting post about maintainable CSS, and proposes modular CSS and Dave Hyatt’s rules for CSS use in Mozilla skins as possible solutions. For myself, I lean toward the former approach; I separated structural markup (the definition of header and sidebar boxes) from presentation markup (type and colors) within different sections of my stylesheet when I was doing the first round of design improvements. Other interesting solutions in the comments to Simon’s post, including this article from Digital Web Magazine about Architecting CSS.

Second, A List Apart provides six methods, of varying degrees of semantic correctness and coolness, for achieving multi-column lists with various combinations of XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Third, ALA also talks about the multi-column module in CSS3, and introduces a Javascript parser for the CSS syntax that helps bootstrap the new capabilities in browsers that don’t yet support the extensions. You have to see some of the examples, particularly numbers 2 and 5, to get why this is so cool, but once you do it’ll make you swear off long scrolling layouts forever.

Open source testing: CSS test suite for IE 7

Alex Barnett blog: IE7 and CSS: the Acid2 test - Microsoft has now been challenged. This is a smart way to put the pressure on Microsoft to fix CSS support in their (aging, broken) browser: get a community effort going early in the development process to put together a comprehensive CSS test suite. This would be a good thing for all browsers, btw, including Safari, to work against. Let’s hope that Microsoft jumps on it.

Mezzoblue on color

mezzoblue: CMYK (for Those Who Do RGB). The post is actually a fantastic primer on all sorts of color related issues for those who grew up with RGB. When I was doing page layout for various independent and student magazines, it took me a long time to try to do anything in color for precisely the issues outlined in the article: what you see isn’t necessarily what you’ll get in process; there are also spot colors to worry about; and of course type (where I spent my formative time) is complex enough without adding the additional dimension and expense of color. The Mezzoblue article is an excellent demystification of the technologies involved; bravo.

Accessible data graphics

Standards-Schmandards: An accessible bar chart. Very cool use of tables plus CSS to produce a graph that can be understood by a downlevel browser or screen reader.

Heads down

Today is a low-posting day. I’m doing some coding on the site, adding a feature—and relearning a lot of CSS lessons I had forgotten. One of the nice things about the site is that I haven’t had to touch the CSS stylesheets in almost a year, but things have gotten a bit rusty in the meantime…

Avoiding search engine confusion with charset

Following up on an old thread, the reason that MSN Search thought my pages were in Chinese and other languages rather than English was a problem with the charset specified for my pages. My site used to specify its charset as Macintosh: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=macintosh">. Unfortunately, MSN’s search crawler doesn’t understand this charset. So as an experiment I tried changing the charset to UTF-8 on my front page, while leaving the deep pages untouched. Now an MSN search on my name no longer brings up garbage characters.

That’s the good news. The bad is that re-rendering my whole site to fix the charset on all the deep pages will be a royal pain.

Who cares about accessibility? It has small caps

Safari 1.2 is out. Along with all the new features touted on Apple’s site and revealed on ThinkSecret, including enhanced navigational options, resumable downloads, and support for LiveConnect between JavaScript and Java applets, it has what is, for me, the most important feature of all.

It supports font-variant: small-caps.

Let me repeat that: it supports font-variant: small-caps.

Finally. All my carefully designed small caps, in full living typographical color on Safari. I’m thrilled to pieces. Of course, I’m also noting that Georgia in small caps kind of washes out at that point size. Sigh.

Minor stylesheet fix

Anita was kind enough to point out that I hadn’t bothered to set background or text colors in my new lean mean stylesheet, which makes the page look kind of funny in Netscape 4 or in any browser where you can set your own background color.

This is an easy mistake to make when you’re moving away from deprecated HTML attributes. In my case, I changed my style sheet to use a plain old <body> tag instead of Manila’s {body} macro, which automatically inserts deprecated attributes for background color, text color, link color, and so forth. The way to handle it is either to set the attributes background (for the background color) and color (for the default text color), or else not to use any colored elements in your design at all and make the user responsible for his or her own bad taste.

At any rate, I’ve made the fix; shift-reload to get the change (very minor).

The IE Factor?

Interesting article at StopDesign describing real work experience in getting CSS layouts to work across platforms. As those who have been reading the Web Design department through my last redesign will attest, this is a non-trivial challenge; some apparently easy CSS styles will work well in one browser while not working at all in another.

But why is it the IE Factor? That is, why does IE get the blame for non-conformant behavior? That’s the question some of my coworkers might ask. After all, it has CSS support; after all, it’s the minority browser. And after all, other browsers have their own quirks. Why single out IE?

Based on my experience and StopDesign’s article (and Bryan Bell’s Designers Against Stagnant Internet Explorer (DASIE) manifesto), I think IE is getting heat for the following reasons:

IE 6 was released in 2001. The most recent major revisions of the competing browsers, Mozilla/Firebird and Opera (as well as other significant browsers like Safari and OmniWeb) were all released in the last six months. That’s two solid years of designers actually using CSS and documenting their problems.
Mozilla is open source; Safari is developed by a guy with a weblog where he responds to customer comments. The IE team has so far kept a very low profile about the future of their products; in fact, they’ve committed publicly to infrequent releases of new features, in line with the Windows software development cycle.
Adding insult to injury, not only does IE not incorporate two-plus years of real world customer feedback, it’s the dominant platform. So it’s held to a higher standard—any flaw gets dramatically magnified.

Why are we in this boat? I think, after Netscape imploded, a lot of people thought that innovation and change was gone from the HTML space and attention shifted to the web services space, where presentation isn’t as important as XML, namespaces, and actual programming languages.

But I think IE has competition again. More importantly, I think the various campaigns to get people to upgrade to modern browsers have led more designers to push the envelope of what can be done with (X)HTML+CSS. And I think that’s a good thing.